Hacked

The other day I got an email I hoped I would never get:

BENJAMIN A,

It's important that we speak with you.
Please call us at 1-800-427-9428.

With your assistance, we would like to verify some potentially suspicious activity that we have detected on your MASTERCARD PLATINUM account ending in XXXX. We want to ensure that all charges have been authorized by you. In order to avoid any inconvenience it is very important that we speak with you. Please call us at 1-800-427-9428 as soon as possible.

Yup, my credit card was hacked. There were a half dozen random charges on my card that had clearly not been made by me. Besides the random charges I'm sure the activity was suspicious since I've only used my card about a half dozen times in the last two years, let alone two day.

I'd like to send a big Ahoy Hanoi thank you to Capital One for canceling my card. I'd like to send a big Ahoy Hanoi F-U to whoever hacked my card. Not cool!

The irony in this is that last week I had two visitors in town (a friend of a friend and my friend's brother). My friend's brother asked me if anyone takes credit cards in Hanoi. While explaining that a few places will take credit cards, I took mine out to look at the expiration date. I was happy to see that the date was a year away. This was comforting to me because my driver's license and ATM card are about to expire. Well, now that Capital One canceled my card I'm sort of plastic free for a few weeks. If I was in America this would be a big deal. However, in a cash country this doesn't make me stress at all.

My Turn To Cook

Before Tet I told Huyen's parents that I was going to cook them a meal during Tet. It occured to me one day that her parents have never eaten anything in their lives except Vietnamese food. That's such a bizarre concept for me since I've had days in Los Angles where I ate Dim Sum for breakfast, Mexican for lunch and sushi for dinner.

I debated for a while what I should cook them and decided that pasta would be a good transition dish for them. Pasta is noodle based (which they like), has cooked tomatoes (which they often eat) and could be flavored with other vegetables or chicken. The day before Tet I went to the supermarket and bought a big box of Barilla pasta and a large container of Italian tomato sauce.

When we arrived at Huyen's house we unpacked the ingredients and put them on the second floor of the house, right near the stairwell. Wellllllllll, the meal before I was supposed to cook my pasta Huyen's mother "accidentally" dropped the sauce down the stairs:



Meal canceled. Sheesh, I can take a hint.

Officially The Biggest Spider Ever

I have seen more than my fair share of big spiders in Southeast Asia. However, this spider officially takes the cake. I was walking down the stairwell in my apartment building when this thing caught my eye. It was huge! The section of the wall that this spider was on is about a foot long; the spider was taking up half of it. On top of that, it's legs were very very very thick. I would say that they were about the width of my pinkies...and if you've ever seen my hands, I've got fat fingers.

I started to irrationally fear for my life and quickly grabbed the nearest Vietnamese person I could find -- a man working downstairs in my building. I showed him the spider and he barely flinched. He methodically grabbed a stick and a broom and went after the thing. This is when I took out my video camera and started to film from about twenty feet away (this is why the spider doesn't look monstrous in the video). Standing behind me was the Vietnamese man's son who happened to be at the building that day. Well, the man climbed up on a stool and went after the spider. By "went after" I mean he pushed it off the wall and on to the floor where it quickly stampeded towards me and the little boy. As you can tell from the video, I was petrified. The boy and I ran down the stairs so fast it was as if a tiger was chasing us. Check out this video:

MY PARENTS ARE OUT OF TOWN!!!!!!

Tonight Huyen is going to Ho Chi Minh City for work which means I have our apartment all to myself. Huyen told me I'm not allowed to have any parties. I think she said this to me because during Tet I asked her, "When parents go out of town in Vietnam, do kids have parties?" Huyen started to beam and said, "Yeah! Yeah! When our parents would go away we would have parties! We would cook whatever we wanted!" This is the kind of innocence that you get in Vietnam that you don't get in America. Can you imagine some teenager in a high school cafeteria yelling out, "My parents are out of town!!! We can cook whatever we want!!!!"

Small Town, Big Price

(PICTURE: Huyen's mom pointing at her brother-in-law's name.)

Just like last year, during Tet, we visited Huyen's Uncle's grave. Huyen's Uncle -- for those of you who are new readers -- was killed by the Americans during the war and his body has never been recovered. He has an empty tomb in the military cemetery located in Huyen's small town. His name is also listed on this table. He's #31:


The tablet has all the names of the townspeople who died fighting the French, the Americans and the Cambodians.

#14-#62 on the tablet are people who died fighting the Americans. That's 48 people. I asked Huyen's sister how many people live in the town that is represented by this military cemetery. She told me maybe 1,000. That means about 4% of the town died fighting the Americans. In my head I naturally thought back to last summer when I marched in the Memorial Day parade with my father. On that day I took a picture of the Vietnam Memorial in my town:

(PICTURE: One of Livingston's war memorials.)

According to the 2000 census of Livingston, the town's population was 27,391 people. If 4% of our town's population died fighting, that would mean 1,095 people would have died. The Vietnam War's first Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, was a notorious numbers cruncher. I wonder what he would have said to those numbers...

Tombs In The Rice Paddies

When Huyen's great grandmother passed away, I wrote about how people are buried in the rice paddies. Well, over Tet, for the second year in a row, we visited some of Huyen's relative's tombs in the rice paddies:



While walking to her Grandmother's tomb we passed these tombs which I thought were quite picturesque:



There's something really beautiful to me about being buried like this. Cemeteries usually feel really sad to me and I think its because people end up spending eternity on land that they have no attachment to. In Vietnam people are buried where they spent their lives, raised their families and literally where they got their food to survive.

Apex English: Scholarship

One of my goals with my school was to make a more affordable language school for students. The fact is that all language schools in Hanoi are geared towards the middle and upper class. From my research, I'm pretty sure that per class, APEX is the cheapest language school in Hanoi where students learn from a native speaker. On top of that, from what I've been told, my school is only about a dollar more per class than many of the private Vietnamese teachers. That said, my school is still not cheap and unfortunately isn't affordable for poor students. However, I have offered scholarships to students who wish to learn at Apex but can't afford the cost.

When I spoke at all of the universities, I told the students about the scholarship. Everyone seemed really excited but only two people applied. To apply, students merely had to write a short essay about why they wanted to learn English. I accepted both students and gave them scholarships. However, one student's level is higher than the class I'm teaching so she told me she would like to wait for a higher level class.

Eventually I want to set up a program where I get donations from people to sponsor students to learn English. In my head the students could then correspond with their sponsor about their English progress. I'm not exactly sure how to go about doing this but it is something I'll definitely be thinking about and looking into...