Flood Tidbits

(PICTURE: The leak in my ceiling)

Two other small anecdotes about the flood:

Anecdote 1: While cooking dinner yesterday a mouse scampered across my kitchen floor. He darted from behind my refrigerator towards the front door. After comforting Huyen who is deathly afraid of mice and rats, I went looking for the critter. There are only a couple places he could have gone to and I deduced he must have gone down a drain in the 1/2 bathroom on the ground floor. I went outside, found a loose brick and placed it over the drain. Problem solved. Well, not quite. I clearly deduced wrong because while eating breakfast the next morning the mouse sprinted out from behind the refrigerator again. Once again I had to comfort Huyen and then went looking for the mouse. For those of you who have been avid readers for a while, you'll recall this is my second rodent problem. Huyen and I figure this mouse must have come into my house the night we couldn't put down our front door. Fortunately this mouse is about 1/3 the size of the rat at my old place. Hopefully stick traps will do the job.

Anecdote 2: I have a small leak in my roof which has been dripping on my nicely polished wooden steps on my fifth floor. As you can figure out water + polished wood equally a slippery surface. Well, I'm officially an old man because I slipped on the stairs yesterday and fell down eight steps. Both my arms and my upper right butt are really bruised. The stupid thing is that I walked on the slippery step about twenty times prior to slipping and every time thought, "Put down a towel." I've now put down a towel.
(PICTURE: The set of stairs I fell down)

Flood: Night 1

Question: What's worse than having water slowly rise on your street?
Answer: The power going off in your neighborhood so you can't really see the water.

That's right, at around noon on the first day of the flood the electricity went out in my section of the city. As the day went on we kept thinking it would come back on...but it didn't. One major problem with not having power is that my front door is basically an electric garage door (You may recall it from this blog entry: http://ahoyhanoi.blogspot.com/2008/09/no-more-ninjas.html ). When we moved in we asked the owner what would hypothetically happen if our electricity went out and we, you know, might want to leave our house. Our landlord, Thanh, told us that the door had a battery and would still work without power. What she didn't tell us is that it would only work roughly 3 3/4 times.

For some reason my school wasn't canceled (as you saw in yesterday's video) and in the midst of my second class (with two students) I got a phone call from Huyen. Normally I don't have my phone on during class but in this situation I answered it. Huyen said to me, "Ohhhhh, something very bad has happened. The front door won't go down."

Turns out our battery ran out of juice as the door was about a foot and a half from closing. A foot and a half is enough space to climb under BUT it's not enough space to get our motorbikes under. With the water level rising our bikes would have been ruined if we kept them outside. Huyen went over to the neighbor on the left of our house and asked if we could park our bikes in their house for the night. The neighbor said no (and with no shame asked me 24 hours later if I could teach her children English). Huyen went over to the neighbor on the right side of our house and they showed some neighbourly love and said yes. When I came home from work at 9:15 I pulled into the neighbors house. The neighbor had a slight look of panic on his face when he saw me. I'm guessing it was because my bike was partially smoking from driving through thigh high/engine high water.

After parking my bike I crawled under our stuck door and was handed a candle. Our night of darkness was starting...

Thank You, America!!!

Just got back from watching 8 hours of CNN at the bar (which coincidentally was on the same soil that McCain was imprisoned in). I'm proud to say that I wasn't the only person with tears running down his cheeks during Obama's speech. What makes me really excited is that my friend Matt, a kiwi, was also choked up.

Way to go, America!

The World Is Watching: Vote Obama

Over the past eight months I've traveled to Australia, China, Cambodia, Singapore, Malaysia and obviously Vietnam. I can honestly tell you that every foreigner/non-US citizen I have met has the same opinion about the US election: "I hope Obama wins."

For the most part, everyone I have talked politics with has respected America but feels that over the last few years our country has been headed in the wrong direction. Echoing Obama's message, people from around the world want to see America change for the better. Sometimes it takes an outsider to get a fair and honest opinion.

I'll keep this short and sweet: GO VOTE FOR OBAMA!

Flood Videos: Day 1

On Friday morning I went out at 7:30AM for my usual pho breakfast. As I turned the corner though I noticed something -- the street was flooded. My little alley must be slightly elevated because it was completely dry versus the neighboring street which had about a foot of water. I looked at a girl who happened to turn the corner at the same moment as me and raised my eyebrows to say, "Whoah." She gave me an equally surprised look. I turned around and walked to my second breakfast spot in the opposite direction. When I got the restaurant choice B I was equally surprised to see that only three people were on the street. Why is this so surprising? Well, my second restaurant spot is in the middle of a lake-side market which generally has at least a hundred people buying and selling food. Luckily one of the three people there was my breakfast lady who served me a delicious hot breakfast.

A couple hours later I went back outside and noticed that my street was now flooded. Only about a thirty foot section of my street was still dry -- luckily my house was smack in the middle of that section.

Anyway, my camera has officially dried and is being recognized again by my computer. I put together this little two minute video of the first day of the flood:

Flood Pictures

So how bad is the flood? This picture was taken about fifteen feet from my front door:


Perhaps you're asking yourself what that is? Well, it is a dead fish. Yes, a dead fish. The flood is so bad that the local lake overflowed and fish were swimming on my street. This one must have choked to death on the garbage that was floating everywhere.

I'll have a whole bunch of video I took up on the blog soon. However, to hold over the tide (pun intended) here's some pictures I got off a Vietnamese news website.

(PICTURE: Our Mai Chau stilt house)

(NOTE: You may have read on the news that Hanoi is completely flooded. Well, it's the truth. About 60-80% of the roads in the city are under water at the moment. I've got some GREAT footage of it BUT my camera, which got pretty wet, isn't uploading photos/videos. Hopefully my camera will dry out tonight and I can blog about the flood of '08 tomorrow). But until then, back to Mai Chau:

The ride from Hanoi to Mai Chau took Justin and I about six hours. One thing I've learned a few times is that Honda Waves are meant for short trips/city driving. After about an hour or so my hands and feet became numb and my back was aching. To fight the body pain we were both experiencing we stopped a few times on our journey.

At one of the stops, a pretty strange thing happened. We went to this outdoor cafe and sat down at a table in a gazebo. The owner/waiter came over and asked us what we wanted. Using my best Vietnamese I asked for two iced milk coffees. The waiter looked confused -- clearly not understanding my accent -- until I heard somebody behind me repeat my order. The person's voice was pretty high pitched but the owner/waiter understood him and went to make us our drinks. A few minutes later I turned around to see who had repeated my order and was surprised to see that nobody was there. The only thing there was a PARROT. Yes, a parrot understood my Vietnamese better than any Vietnamese person I've met.

Anyway, we eventually got to Mai Chau and I decided to do something pretty stupid -- ride and film at the same time. Here's a little of the footage:



You can't fully tell, but I almost nailed that cow. I had a last second swerve to avoid it.

After pulling into the village we found the stilt house (AKA adult tree house) that Ryan and Jessica had stayed at a couple months ago (see the picture at the top). Overall it was a great ride to Mai Chau. There was tons of beautiful scenery and best of all, no accidents!