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.

My New Pants

(PICTURE: My new pants.)

I'm not much of a souvenir buyer but I ended up getting something up in Sapa.

After exiting the cave to China we were confronted by an old Hamong woman who invited us into her home. We knew that she just wanted to sell us stuff but the desire to see inside her home outweighed the annoyance of more harassment.

The women basically lived in a big barn where she slept, cooked and raised a dozen or so pigs. She told us that we could buy a pig for around $3. That was for one of the big adult pigs. Strangely the smaller baby pigs were more expensive. Apparently they are more delicious. Ryan asked the woman if we bought a pig could she cook it for us. The woman said no but that she'd put it in a bag and we could drive it back into town and have someone cook it at a restaurant. We passed on transporting the pig in a bag.

It only took a couple of minutes before the woman's girl friends came over and started to try and wheel and deal. Nothing interested me except the clothes they were wearing. I asked, "Do you have any pants?" Huyen translated my question and moments later the woman was handing me a pair of hand-made pants from her closet. The pants actually fit and despite -- a) the fact they they have no pockets b) I'll never actually wear the pants -- I bought them. They cost me about $15... or roughly 5 large pigs.

PJ's Accident: The Sequel

(PICTURE: PJ after being cleaned up and bandaged)

On our second day in Sapa we decided to take a four hour road trip to Bac Ha, a mountain town famous for its Sunday market. We departed around nine in the morning for the northwest town. The first hour was spent in cruise control as we glided down the 36km mountain we had climbed up the day before. After going through Lao Cai -- and asking directions about ten times -- we jumped on an amazingly smooth highway. The stretch of road was far and away the nicest road I have seen in Vietnam. It seemed even nicer after five minutes of cruising on it when it abruptly ended and turned into the worst road I've ever seen.

I had heard that the road from Lao Cai to Bac Ha was under construction but hearing that and seeing it are two different stories. The road was a disaster. The whole thing was a stretch of deep pot holes mixed with gravel and dusty air...oh, and GIGANTIC CONSTRUCTION TRUCKS coming at us from both directions.

After about twenty minutes on this road, and passing many trucks, I made another passing move around an enormous garbage-truck-like vehicle when I heard Huyen scream, "PJ! PJ!" I looked in my rear view mirror and through the dust could see PJ picking himself up off the ground. I immediately pulled off to the side of the road and said, "I think he's alright. I could see him getting up." Well, PJ was basically alright...minus a hole bunch of cuts and scrapes.

For those of you who are counting, yes, it was PJ's second one-vehicle accident in as many days.

(PICTURE: Road Rash anyone?)

We were basically in the middle of nowhere when this happend yet somehow a half dozen people came to the road within twenty seconds of the accident. One family escorted PJ into their roadside shop which became our make-shift emergency room. Huyen washed off PJ and with the help of the random lady, cleaned PJ's wounds.

(PICTURE: Huyen cleaning PJ and the family who helped us out)

Just a thought that I think is pretty amazing. It's wonderful how wounds heal both literally and figuratively. PJ's father served in Vietnam during the war. Just think that only about 40 years later, PJ was in the same country, in "enemy territory" being helped/clean/treated by the same people who we fought against not so long ago. Call me a sap, but I think that says something great about the human spirit. Clearly if this family were Americans they'd be Democrats.

If you're wondering how the bike was, well, it was only slightly wrecked. PJ broke the gear shifter and a couple other little things. Luckily in Vietnam, repair shops are seemingly every 100 yards or so. After PJ was repaired, Huyen rode his bike to the nearby shop and had that repaired too.

As they say, "Third time's the charm." PJ, bloody wounds and all, insisted on getting back on his bike and riding it to Bac Ha. He made it the rest of the way without a problem. However, my ear has ached since from listening to Huyen say to me 1,000 times, "I'm very scared for PJ. I'm very scared for PJ."
(PICTURE: Getting the bike fixed)

Sapa Grill

Before my trip my students told me that Sapa was famous for two things:

Famous Thing #1: The Love Market

Supposedly every Saturday night ethnic boys come to the market to find their wives. When I say "boys" I mean boys. The grooms-to-be are fifteen years old. And well, their wives-to-be are even younger -- they're thirteen. I was told that the boys come and play traditional ethnic instruments and then walk up to a girl who they like and tap their foot on top of the girl's foot. If the girl taps the boy's foot back they're a couple. If she doesn't, the boy is rejected.

Despite all the hype about the love market, it just wasn't what it was cracked up to be. We saw four teenage boys playing traditional instruments but no girls in sight. Huyen told us that times have changed and now the boys go somewhere to look at pictures of the girls. If they like the girls I guess the girls are then showed pictures of the boys. Yeah, it's only a couple of years before internet dating hits the ethnic tribes.


Famous Thing #2: The Sapa Grill

All around the center of town people set up shop along the edge of the street to sell grilled stuff. Basically they grill everything. The standard items were eggs, sticky rice, pork, chestnut-like things and sweet potatoes. However, once in a while something a little odder would show up on the grill. For example, before we knew it, we were grilling up tiny birds from the forest. The birds were so small that three of them fit on one skewer. The feathers were plucked but that's about all the preperation there was. Once the birds were grilled we just popped them into our mouth.

Check them out in the video:



PJ took a bite of his and then gave it to me. I think the brains oozing out of one on the grill kind of turned him off. Can you say "rookie"?

Rice Fields and Water Buffalos

(PICTURE: Our unofficial tour guide)

Using our extremely unreliable tourist map we headed out to some "ancient stones" out in some rice paddies. The views were amazing but what was really amazing is that you literally couldn't go anywhere without an ethnic person trying to sell you something. As soon as we parked our bikes this adorable little girl (who was way to young to be shlepping her adorable little brother on her back) started to follow us:



After about ten minutes of winning us over with her cuteness she pulled out a bunch of trickets. I was a sucker and bought a "hand made" wallet...which I literally saw thirty others just like in the village.

Here's a nice video capturing the whole scene: