GHOST!

As you may recall, I think my new house is haunted. When we first toured the house -- which was in the middle of being built -- there was a doll facing a wall in an empty room. Yeah, Blair Witch Style. I tried taking two pictures of the doll and they both came out fuzzy. Maybe it was the weak camera battery or maybe it was spirits.

It turns out that there was another huge box of dolls in the house which used to belong to the owners daughter and for some reason they want to store at our house. They put the dolls on our fifth floor, in an empty room in front of the balcony where we hang our laundry, and wrapped them in a plastic sheet. Why they need to store the dolls here, I don't know. I also haven't seen THE DOLL that was standing in the corner. No, I'm not joking.

Well, since we've moved in there have been lots of little signs that there is a ghost. A few strange things:

1. The window in my bathroom randomly rattles all the time when I'm in my bathroom.

2. One day I came home and my door was open. This is odd since I always lock it before I leave the house. What was weird is that the door handle was still locked but the door was open.

3. A few times I've been doing work in my room and have heard a knock on my door. I get up thinking it's Ryan and well, nobody is there...and Ryan isn't home.

4. Yesterday I went upstairs to hang my clothes to dry and about a dozen of the dolls were scattered across the floor in the room they're stored in. Somehow they had gotten out of the box and moved about ten feet away from it.

There's only two explanations for #4: a) The construction was so strong yesterday that it shook the box open and scattered the dolls. b) A ghost did it.

Lets just hope the ghost is friendly.

The Tide Has Turned

They say that boys like girls like their mothers. Well, you're gonna want to take a seat for this one. Huyen is a lot like my mom. No, Huyen isn't a suburban Jewish mother. And no, my mother isn't an unemployed Vietnamese woman.

However, they do have a lot in common including great mothering instincts (Huyen is phenomenal whenever kids are around) and the knack for firing off 100 questions at me in a span of five minutes. But there's something else I found out this week. Huyen has grey hairs...and a bunch of them! They're all nestled in a little spot on the right side of her head. For those of you who know my mother, she's got a grey hair or two also.

If you've been reading my blog for a while you'll recall the video where Huyen plucked the grey hairs from my head. She loves coming up behind me when I'm doing work and yanking my colorless hairs and telling me, "You're so old." Well, the tide has turned. This week I got to pull Huyen's white hairs out.

Vaccines

After hearing for the 94th time how Japanese Encephalitis could turn my brain to mush if I was unfortunately bitten by an infected mosquito, I decided to get the vaccine.

The cost of vaccines here are exponentially cheaper than getting them in the states. The Jap E shot in America is $150 a pop...and since you need three of them over a month that's a lot of dough. Here the shots cost $7.00, plus a nurse's fee. Since I was paying the nurse's fee anyway, I thought "Hell I might as well get the Rabies vaccine too" (this decision was helped after seeing quite a few dogs I assumed to be rabid up in Sapa). And since I was getting those vaccines anyway I thought, "Hell, I might as well get the flu vaccine too."

For those of you who are interested I've now had Hep A, Hep B, Typhoid Fever, Tetanus Booster, Jap E, Rabies and the flu shot. What I'm trying to say is, I'm sort of a super hero.

Foreign Languages Are Hard

"Me fail English? That's unpossible."

Ralph Wiggum

Learning another language is really hard. Last week I asked Huyen to start teaching me Vietnamese for 30 minutes every day. After three days I still can't pronounce five of the eleven vowels.

However, this blog is really about Huyen. She speaks English really well but once in a while has little lapses. There was a great exchange the other day that I thought was absolutely classic:

RYAN: Huyen, do you think your English has gotten better since dating Ben?

HUYEN: Thank you.

The Boy Is Back In Town...

(PICTURE: Huyen's new shirt Steve bought for her when he swung by Oakland)

Steve Song -- World Traveler, NY Times Celebrity, LHS Grad '97, Columbia Grad '01, one of the crashers on my floor in April when my house was robbed by ninjas, donater of the camera I use to blog with, author of songer uncensored, and above average baseball player -- swung by Hanoi this week.

Steve managed to say hi to Ryan and I in between a booty call in HCMC (http://songeruncensored.blogspot.com/2008/10/bangladeshcheck.html) and a week of relaxation in Thailand.

Steve had spent a few weeks with me when I first moved to Hanoi back in April. It was good to have him back in town even though it felt like it had only been a month or so since he left. For those of you who don't know, Steve is reason I met Huyen. While at the airport with him in May he started to hit on Huyen's friend and I talked to Huyen. The rest is history.

I'm sure we'll see you again in a couple of months, Steve!...hopefully your hair will be back to normal by then.

Massage?

On our way back to Hanoi we had three hours to kill in Lao Cai before our train departed. We decided it would be a good idea to get massages and started to walk around the neighborhood looking for a place. After a few minutes we found a nice looking spot. We asked how much the massages were and were told they were 120,000 Dong for an hour. That was 30,000 Dong more than massages in Hanoi for fifteen minutes less time. We decided to pass and kept on walking.

After about fifteen minutes I saw a sign that said, "Karaoke and Massages." Ryan, PJ, Huyen and I walked to the front entrance and were greeted by two women. Huyen asked how much the massages were and was told 60,000 Dong for 45 minutes. Huyen negotiated for about thirty seconds and then turned to us and said, "They will charge 60,000 for an hour. But the massages are in the bedroom." This should have been our first sign that this place wasn't exactly legit.

We were escorted up four flights of stairs and taken to a room -- a hotel room. Huyen and I sat on the beds while two girls looked at us oddly. We were sort of confused on what we should be doing. But we weren't the only ones. The "masseuses" looked even more clueless than us.

Long story short, all of us ended up getting massages by girls who had never given a massage in their life. The girl who massaged me literally just rubbed my shoulder-blades for 45 minutes, only taking a break to crack my knuckles. It took me, oh about thirty seconds to realize we were in a whore house and clearly these girls first clients who didn't have sex with them. I was pretty horrified at the situation but kept giggling to myself since Huyen had no idea what was going on. She was actually enjoying her terrible massage.

The highlight for me came when a third girl walked into the room and said something in Vietnamese. Huyen turned to me and asked, "They want to know if you want two girls."

Meat Chopping Contest

In Bac Ha we stumbled into one of the weirder things I've ever seen. The market was closing down but in the back corner was a large cheering crowd. A bunch of the local ethnic people, clearly slightly inebriated, were participating in an odd sport. Basically the men were wagering on whether someone could chop through a huge hunk of pork fat. From what I could make out these were the rules:

1. You bet on how many attempts at swinging the cleaver you get.

2. You must chop completely through the pork fat. You need total separation.

3. If you can chop through the pork fat you get the money AND you get to keep the pork...even though it was covered in dirt from flying into the ground.

The whole event was sort of like the wood (or was it concrete?) breaking scene in Karate Kid 2 (or was it 3?). Anyway, watch this video. It's ridiculous.