Friday, July 31, 2009

Vietnam Day 29 (7/6/09)

Well, we’re reaching the end of the road in terms of our internships and to be perfectly honest, I feel like something of a failure. Mr. Vinh originally asked for one hundred surveys and we’re sending back only a little over half that request. I know there are plenty of reasonable excuses for why we couldn’t finish by the deadline – I’ve been away every weekend since I got here, the hotels wouldn’t let us survey their guests, etc – but none of them make me feel any better about the end result. I still feel like I let down Mr. Vinh and everyone in Ninh Thuan committed to this project. Yet, the fact remains we’re out of time. I’m going to try to do a little more analysis and hopefully the information we collected will be of help in some small way.

After all this time in Saigon, I finally made it to the Lunch Lady today. The Lunch Lady is a street vendor who has somehow managed to stay local while becoming world famous for producing a different amazing soup each day. As you walk up to her stand, the Lunch Lady greets everyone with an incredibly warm smile from underneath her conical hat. Our Vietnamese is sufficient here since all you do to order is tell her the number of bowls and she ladles them out of a large vat, steaming in a metal pot next to her. The soup was outstanding, swimming with thick slippery noodles, slices of beef, fishballs (balls made of fish, not the other thing), and random herbs (and quite possibly other ingredients that I just missed). The broth was rich with oils and spices, but not too heavy – it was so perfect I didn’t even want to put hot sauce in it for fear that I might alter the essence of the soup. I normally have trouble finishing entire bowls of soup, but I could see the bottom of this bowl.

Since we were already so close to the river, we crossed the bridge and just spent some time walking around a part of town we’d never been to. We walked down a side street so narrow it might have been considered an alley but for its length. It wasn’t the slums, but it was definitely a lower class neighborhood than the ones I’ve seen in the city so far. Stores, beauty parlors, and small eateries lined the street beneath the homes on the floors above. Fruit vendors squatted on the sidewalk, at times forcing us onto the dangerously small road with motorbikes whizzing past. Eventually we came to a small bridge set next to a set of homes made primarily from tin, elevated above the water. At least I’m assuming there was water but I couldn’t actually see it to confirm. There was garbage covering every inch of the water’s surface – plastic bags and styrofoam containers full of rotting food completely consumed the putrid river (no wonder no one can drink the water here). We’d been told about the pollution and trash dumping before, but seeing it to this extent was shocking. It frustrated me to think how hard it would be to clean this mess up, not to mention trying to prevent further pollution here. The people in these rundown homes on the water have no way of getting rid of their trash besides tossing it out the back door – it’s not their fault that the government has insufficient trash collection (and almost non-existent recycling collection). Now this was a decent dose of culture shock.

Later in the afternoon, I engaged in another quality cultural outing. We visited a mosque, which was not a highly decorated touristy one like we’d expected when we saw it in the guidebook, but an average place of worship for the surrounding Muslim community. We took off our shoes and walked up onto a little patio, which is apparently where the women pray while the men enter the slightly closed off room in the middle, where they can kneel before Allah on numerous oriental rugs all overlapping one another. As Molly, Alex, Kendra, and I sat in the female section, a woman dressed in the full traditional muslin outfit (made up of a long black dress and an attached head covering) waved at me from the small room where she was working. She then got up and came to join us on the floor. We sat there for some time trying to communicate through the language barrier. I think all parties involved got something out of it even without understanding everything (she did speak a little English and even without it she taught us the proper Muslim way to pray). Sitting with this woman was quite an experience, but at some point we started running out of things we could reasonably communicate through Charades. We gathered up our shoes and left the green mosque to go to dinner.

For dinner, we treated our Vietnamese roommates to the closest thing to an “American” meal we could think of – burgers and fries at a restaurant called Blackcat. It’s a pretty upscale restaurant with nice décor and random Western music, though we barely fit in the space reserved for us. The menu was really amusing, each burger had a cutesy name related to cats (and two of the smoothies were named the Johnny Depp and the Halle Berry). I for instance got the “bobcat” with barbecue sauce and bacon served on an English muffin of all things (not a bad combination actually). Wen and Ming split a huge burger bigger than my face, so thick that they had to stretch their jaws to what looked like an uncomfortable degree just to eat it. My favorite part of the meal was the drink Kendra and I split that satisfied all of our cravings – it was a chocolate, banana, and peanut butter shake (both of our usual Cookout orders as it turns out) that was to die for. There were mixed reviews from the roommates about the burgers. Some liked it, others flat-out told us they really didn’t like it. Van Anh’s only comment was that the food was really heavy and filling (which makes sense because a burger has so much more meat than most Vietnamese food). I hope she liked it, but either way Blackcat was an interesting experience for all of us.

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