Teacher Of The Year

It's official: My students love me.

A couple weeks ago one of my classes finished and after the last class two of my students bashfully came up to me and presented me with presents. I got a sweet new key chain and a mug that says, "Friend Forever." That's right, I've got a Vietnamese friend forever!!!

(PICTURE: My new favorite mug and key chain)

I really appreciated the gifts but what I liked even better were the cards:

In case you can't read the cards they say:

CARD 1: I wish you have a good life and a succeed job. Thanks to you, my speaking and listening is better. Student, Van <=Cloudy>

CARD 2: The course has just finished. I have a gift for you. And I want to say that during the course, you done very well. I regret to not continue studying there. I am always your friend. Best wishes for you, An.

Now the question arises: Why didn't my other twelve students write me cards/buy me gifts!

My Sister

My sister's job is to deal with the press and well, to get good/bad information about people out there. Hannah's great at doing her job for other people but not so great at doing it for herself. Simply put, Hannah hasn't been mentioned on Ahoy Hanoi in months -- and well, if you want to be anyone on the internet you need your name on Ahoy Hanoi.

All of the good press as of late has gone towards my brother. Having a baby will do that. Well, I think my sister is starting to mount a campaign to get her name back out there.

Last week Hannah was at the Democratic National Convention. Every morning I would wake up to watch the speeches with the hopes of seeing Hannah in the background. When Hannah wasn't too busy bumping elbows with politicians she managed to send me an email or two. On one of the first days I commented to her that I thought Montana's Governor Schweitzer gave a great speech. Well, just a few days later Hannah sent me this email:

conversation*:

Me: Hi, Governor. My brother lives in Vietnam but he saw your speech and raved about it.
Schweitzer: He lives in Vietnam? How did he watch it?
Me: The internet I guess? Anyway, if we took a picture together I think it'd make him really jealous.
Schweitzer: Yeah? Let's do it! For your brother.

*it went something like that. The party was very loud.

Welcome back to Ahoy Hanoi, Hannah. And a big welcome to you Governor. And yes, I'm jealous.

Google Analytics

Some of you may have noticed that about a week ago I took down the counter on my website. I decided that instead of having a counter with some annoying advertisement I'd instead sign up for google analytics.

For those of you who have never heard of google analytics, don't worry, neither did I until last week. Basically it's a free google site that tells you nearly everything about who is visiting your website. When I say nearly everything, I mean nearly everything. It's basically the real life version of Orwell's Big Brother. I can now see where people are logging on to my site, for how long, how often, where they are coming from, going to, etc. So yeah, those of you who pretend to read my blog, I now know you're not OR just reading it for two seconds.

After a week here is some of the cooler information I've gotten:
1. I had 582 visits on my site last week.
2. I had 236 Unique Visitors. That means 236 different people read my blog. That's 234 more than I thought...the two being my mother and I.
3. The Average person reads my blog for 5 minutes and 18 seconds.
4. The Average Person in Livingston, NJ (my hometown) reads my blog for 1:31 seconds. That means my MOTHER gets bored from my website faster than almost everyone else!
5. In the USA, I'm the most popular in California. I had 97 hits there last week. That's followed by 90 in NYC, 50 in NJ, 12 in Colorado (Hi, Ryan's family!), and 11 in Illinois. After that I've got people in 17 other states reading my blog. Pretty cool....except for the fact that only 8 people are reading it in DC. Come on, Hannah, I thought you got your friends to bookmark my site!!!
6. My blog is also popular in other places. I currently have people reading my blog in 18 countries: USA, Canada, Vietnam, Israel, Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, France, Germany, the UK, Italy, South Korea, Turkey, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Greece and China.

That said, the COOLEST thing about google analytics is I can see how people FOUND my site. For example, what did they put into google as search words that gave them ahoyhanoi. The number 1 search people have used is pretty obvious: "ahoy hanoi." Well, the second one isn't quite as obvious and well it is frankly HILARIOUS. Can you guess what it is? I'll give you ten seconds:
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Okay, the number two search put into google to find my website is: "VIETNAMESE GIRLFRIEND NEEDED." That's not as random as you think. The #8 most used search words were, "Vietnamese Girlfriend." I also like the 16th and 17th most searched words: "Hanoi Famous Massage Place" and "Hanoi + Massages." Number 23 is great too: "Meeting Girls In Hanoi."

Ahoy Hanoi offers a little something for everyone!

The Callahan Rule

Overall I had a pretty good tournament. I made some nice catches, scored a bunch of points, and had zero throwing turnovers (I also dropped three frisbees...which has been haunting me since).

That said, the memory I'll take away form this tournament has to do with the Callahan Rule.

You're probably saying to yourself, "What's the Callahan Rule?" Well, that's what I said when I received an email a few days before the tournament with official rules. In the rules, which I glanced over, it said something about "Playing with the Callahan Rule." I didn't think twice about it until the night before the tournament. At the tournament registration party a few of us got to talking and one of my teammates, Long, said, "Did you look at the rules? It said something about the Callahan. I looked it up on Wikipedia and it says if you intercept the frisbee in your endzone you get a point." I said, "Cool." The subject quickly changed...

For the record, here's the Wikipedia definition:

Scoring

A point is scored when a player catches a pass in the endzone his team is attacking. In older versions of the rules, only offensive players could score. However, current UPA and WFDF rules allow a defensive team to score by intercepting a pass in the endzone they are defending. This play is referred to as a Callahan goal or simply a Callahan. It is named after well-known ultimate player Henry Callahan.

CUT TO:

It's the second game of the day on Saturday. We're playing Bangkok and are currently leading 2-0. Bangkok intercepted a pass from our team and quickly turned around and marched towards our endzone. I read the Bangkok play, turned on my jets and dove to intercept a Bangkok pass in our endzone.

If I can gloat for a second, it was an awesome defensive play. I stood up from the ground and declared, "CALLAHAN!! That's a point." I then slammed the frisbee down. Well, nobody was sharing my excitement. Not from my team or Bangkok. In fact, a couple people were laughing. I think the only person who was on board with me was Long who may have given me a fist pump from the sideline. Well, the team captain of Bangkok walked up, laughed and said, "Dude, Callahans are when you intercept it in that endzone." He pointed to the far end of the field. Turns out it's only the endzone you are attacking. What I did turned out to be a turnover on me since I threw the frisbee down. Bangkok got the frisbee on the goal line and promptly scored.

I walked over to our sidelong and approached Long: "I thought..." Before I could finish my sentence, Long said, "I guess Wikipedia isn't always right." FU Wikipedia.

The Tournament

(PICTURE: VUDOO NORTH)

Our team is called VUDOO North. VUDOO stands for: Vietnam Ultimate Defense Offense Organization. Like much of recent Vietnamese history, VUDOO is divided into North and South.

That said, our team was hardly a true North Vietnamese team. Originally we had about fifteen people going from the capital but during the month leading up to the tournament, player after player kept dropping out. David Jensen (back row in the picture, third from the left) from HCMC became our honorary captain and put together a rag-tag crew to represent the north of 'Nam.

It should be noted that David Jensen is an ultimate frisbee legend. Before I met David I had heard a lot about him. Out of all the quotes my favorite one was, "He's ranked as one of the top ultimate players in Southeast Asia." Upon hearing this I just remember thinking, "Really? There's a ranking system?" And then my egotistical self thought, "Do they know I live in Southeast Asia? I was the co-senior athlete at LHS in '97 so I've got to be at least in the top 100, right?" Anyway, after seeing David play it was pretty obvious that even if there isn't a ranking, he's definitely one of the best players in Asia. The guy is sick.

Besides being great at frisbee, David is also a great team manager. Within a week of our team falling apart David put together a solid crew of freelance ultimate players. Our team ending up having a core from Hanoi but also four players from Japan and four from Singapore. Oh, and our free-agents happen to be awesome...even the two high school girls we recruited from Singapore (Let me make the joke for you: Ben, I knew you moved to Asia to hang out with high school girls).

On the first day we played one of the better teams from Singapore. Yes, one of the better teams. Maybe you're asking yourself how many teams are there in Singapore. I'm not exactly sure but there are at least 8...oh, and it's a STATE SPONSORED SPORT. These teams get money from the government to recruit players. They also practice three days a week.

Now our team, well, we practiced once -- the day before the tournament...and about five of our players weren't there...and we didn't know each other's names...and I was probably in the fourth best shape of anyone....and I hadn't run a mile in six months. So what I'm trying to say is, if I was a betting man, I would have bet on Singapore. That said, we beat them by three. It helps having one of the best players from SE Asia on your team.

Our next game was against a team from Bangkok. We kicked their ass too. I think the score was 13-4.

Next up was a team from Australia. They took an early 2-0 lead on us. David -- have I mentioned he's pretty freaking good at ultimate frisbee -- put his game face on and quickly got our team on the board...a few times. In the end we kicked Australia's ass also. Vudoo was 3-0.

In our final game of the day, in basically a monsoon, we played Vudoo South. It was a classic case of civil war. Well, almost classic. After being told by David we needed to have a large goal differential in order to get a good seeding the following day, we annihilated the southerners 13-1. History repeated itself. The north won again.

At the end of the first day we were 4-0. We were all on cloud 9 and told that the following day we'd be playing one of the best teams from the pool above us. This is where I should mention there were two pools: A & B. We were in the B pool. AKA: the weaker pool.

The next morning we played the second best team from Singapore...and they whooped us. I think the end score was 13-5. After that we played perhaps the third best team from Singapore...and they barely beat us 12-10. In the end, out of 24 teams from about fifteen countries I believe we were ranked around 14th -- not too shabby for a bunch of strangers competing against teams who live and breath frisbee.

At the end of the day I watched the championship game and realized just how far I/we had to go to get to to the top of the Southeast Asian frisbee world. The championship game was between the Philippines (who I was told took 2nd at the World Beach Ultimate Frisbee Championships) and a team called Pyro who happened to be all American dudes with a few American girls and some Chinese/Japanese girls too. I was told that Pyro had been playing together since high school and that their high school was, "famous for ultimate frisbee." Well I believe it.

Both teams were SICK. I mean they were AMAZING. Every single player was basically on the level of David Jensen. They could throw the frisbee a half dozen different ways with ease, having it land forty yards away on a dime. They could all sprint for an hour and not look tired. and jump a solid foot or two in the air like young Jordans... Simply put, these guys and girls were athletes. I thought to myself, "I thought frisbee was for hippies." In the end Pyro won 15-14 in sudden death overtime. It was thrilling...and almost inspired me to get back into shape.


(PICTURE: After our second loss on Sunday. The field was a tad bit muddy. I blame it for our loss.)

Singapore - The Flight

(PICTURE: Singapore's Parliament)

The days preceding my trip to Singapore made me reminisce about my teenage years. I felt like my young pre-pubescent self getting all excited for the annual Memorial Day Tournament that Livingston Lighting, my traveling soccer team, used to take. The only big differences between now and then are:

a) I'm not in good physical shape now.

b) I'm playing for a Vietnamese team. Sure the lightning had Matt Shin and Ben Park but they were Korean-Americans.

c) My parents wouldn't be driving me to the tournament...which meant no Peter, Paul and Mary
or John Denver on repeat for 6 hours of traffic.

d) I was going to play ultimate frisbee instead of soccer -- a sport I just started to play about four months ago.

I got to the airport early and met up with a few of my teammates who were on my flight. Ngan, one of the girls on the team looked pretty nervous and I asked her, "Is this your first flight?" She shook her head yes so I told her everything would be okay. I also told her that sometimes people's ears hurt on flights so she should either chew gum or wiggle her jaw. Ngan didn't believe me...probably because I also told her all women on flights are supposed to bark like dogs during take-off. Well, she should have barked like a dog and chewed gum because about five minutes into the flight I looked at Ngan and she had a pained expression on her face. She pointed at her ear and winced out the word, "Hurt."

But that wasn't the highlight of the flight. The highlight of the flight happened about fifteen minutes later: I was reading my book (Billy Bryson's A Brief History of Nearly Everything) when an all too familiar smell hit my nose. It smelled like dog shit. I looked up and guess who was walking down the aisle towards me -- Minh! That's right Minh, my landlord who had thrown me out of my old house just days earlier (and who I basically called a liar to his face when he cheated us out of about $40 on our security deposit giving us a bogus exchange rate).

Minh and I briefly made eye contact and I smiled at him. He immediately darted his eyes towards the ceiling as if a Michelangelo fresco was painted there and kept walking to the lavatory (where I can only assume he was going to clean the bottom of his shoes off). A couple of minutes later he walked back down the aisle and sat down. I saw him casually whisper something to the person next to him. Sure enough that person casually turned around a minute later and it was Binh. I smiled at her too and she too darted her eyes away. It was like I was Medusa.

Despite my LHS and Syracuse educations I'm really really bad at math. But come on! What are the odds that my landlords would be on the same exact flight as me just days after throwing me out of their house (quick recap for new readers: my girlfriend Huyen slept over my house and my landlords evicted me). Whatever the odds are they aren't good. I'm not a very superstitious person but immediately the thought struck me, "this can't be a good sign for the tournament."

Okay, Maybe A Few Ninjas...

I got back from Singapore and Malaysia yesterday and was greeted with some good and bad news:

Good News: The kitchen is finished and it is really nice. In fact, when the taxi dropped me off Huyen was inside my house preparing a feast (no she doesn't have a key yet, Ryan was home). She cooked a huge meal for Ryan, Jessica and myself as a welcome home meal. It was delicious.

Bad News: Ryan informed me that he left his keys in his motorbike last week and when he returned someone had snatched the garage door opener. All the other keys were still on the key chain except for the garage door opener. So yeah, scratch that blog from yesterday -- the ninjas might in fact have the key to our castle.