Timing! - On Friday, the night before I was to head back to the airport; I was having dinner and chomped down on something solid. Damn - a tooth filling had dropped out! Wonderful timing? My regular dentist does not work weekends, so I contacted a local ‘emergency dental service’ my daughter found on the internet and got a booking for 9am, Saturday. Because of the artificial heart valve, I have to down a huge dose of antibiotics an hour before any dental work. [I’d asked my cardiologist what would happen if I did not gobble the capsules and he calmly said: “You’d probably die.”] So: a good start to an assignment: the pain, the inconvenience and the outrageous expense of dental work!
I had an interesting conversation with the taxi driver on the ride to the airport. He was from Afghanistan and was telling me how many of his family had been killed and we discussed the differences between Islam and Christianity (not much, really) and how the radical elements of the factions of Islam are not doing themselves a favour.
Perth international airport was packed for several flights leaving in the very early hours of Sunday morning. I arrived at 10pm (three hours before the flight was due to leave) and it took an hour and a half to check in and get through immigration!
It took some getting used to all the 000s in the Vietnamese currency again. I was told that the taxi from the airport to the hotel should be around VND700,000; it was 900,000 - about US$45. Also the rather vertical living - my hotel room was on the fourth floor (64 steps) and my assignment was to a multi-level restaurant: nice, large lounge bar on ground floor, then the main restaurant, then the chef’s table for events with an open plan kitchen, then the tiny office right up the top (but it was air-conditioned in the heat and humidity).
My hotel was very convenient to the restaurant, about a five minute walk along a narrow one-way street (with motorcycles going both ways, of course). I had to cross one busy street and quickly got used to the local habit of just walking into a stream of two-way traffic and letting them dodge around you (hopefully!). It still takes a while not to stare at women walking around in pyjamas as street wear.
The room I was in did not have a window and the hotel could be rather noisy at night - people having no regard for sleeping guests: they would stomp up and down the steep, tiled stairs and talk loudly to each other in the wee small hours; then slam the room doors and crank up the television. People would be clattering around at 3am. Most of the women wore the usual inappropriate feet apparel and each step that they took on the stairway sounded like a rifle shot - all 64 steps up/down to the fourth floor, then above - bang/bang/bang!!! You’d think that the extent of communal living would evoke a feeling of consideration for other people - it seems not. What possesses people to drag furniture around the tiled floor at 3am?
One night the person in the room next door arrived at about 1am slammed the door and turned on the TV really LOUD. I put up with it for a while....then went on a prowl in the corridors: I found a fuse-board and kept flicking fuses off until the TV went silent - that fixed that!! However, he must have called reception because, about an hour later: sounds of stomping up the stairs, knocking on the room next door, loud conversations. More stomping back down the stairs; several minutes later, a bunch of people ascended amid loud conversations and they eventually found the ‘tripped’ fuse!!! Probably called an electrician?
I arrived ‘home’ one evening in a lather of perspiration, could not get the room air conditioner to function; and staff were equally unsuccessful. So - they changed my room … it was UP yet another flight of stairs but was larger, it had a shower cubicle instead of just a shower ejecting all over the bathroom floor, it was on a landing (so no one ‘next door’), it was much quieter and - it had a window…!
The restaurant staff were amazed that I lived alone, and were totally astonished that my daughter also lived alone!
The items that get carried around on motorcycles can be amazing. The restaurant purchased ice most mornings from a guy on a motorbike who had a mountain of ice in plastic bags stacked and precariously balanced on the pillion seat up to a meter above his head, just covered with a cloth. The weight of the load would have been amazing and he very gingerly set off after making a sale - never leaving his seat in case the whole kit and caboodle tumbled onto the road. I saw a small motorcycle carrying six people one day - four were sandwiched on the seat and two were standing on the footrests each side, squashing the persons in between them as they hung onto each other - oh: and they were travelling the wrong way on a one-way street against the main traffic flow.
The chef was getting around on a rental motorcycle; one day, he saw an elderly woman on a motorbike zooming along, merrily texting with one hand (eyes down) and she rode straight though a red traffic light. Riders do not even so much as glance behind them when they get on a motorbike and head into the traffic. Someone described the ‘logic’ of the traffic flow as moving “like a shoal of fish” - a good analogy!
Women are wandering the streets selling almost anything - they have a long length of timber on one shoulder and stagger along with huge loads balanced on each end. They are selling assorted produce; some are a ‘portable restaurant’ with food and stacked stools. Bicycles trundle past festooned with goods for sale, such as inflatable toys. Vendors are traversing the streets on motorcycles and bicycles flogging almost anything - some of them with a recording loudly announcing their wares or expertise (such as tradespeople). I saw one woman go past one day carrying huge bundles of brassieres - not sure where the fitting room was?
Contrasting with all that very basic living; amid the basic, buzzing motorcycles and small, horn-blowing taxis are expensive cars like Lexus, Mercedes, Range Rover and even saw an Aston Martin. Regularly parked outside the restaurant was a bright red Audi convertible, and a Bentley; I saw a huge Rolls Royce trundle past one day!
Periodically a posse of cops would roam the streets removing signs on the pavement (then holding them for ransom) and threatening to take away motorcycles (that are parked everywhere). One day they turned up with a tow truck and tried to remove the red Audi. All basically a money-raising exercise for the coppers, of course!
I’m called by different names at different locales; on this one, staff were calling me ‘Chú’ (Vietnamese for ‘uncle’).
I had an email recently from a former female client addressed to: “Dear Dady’.
I rather quickly got into a pattern of having two meals a day with the staff…lunch around 11am (before any customers) and dinner around 5.30pm (before the next meal). Basically sitting on little kiddie’s stools, grouped around a tiny table, downing local food and listening to a torrent of Vietnamese accompanied by the chorus of rather loud chomping, slurping and open-mouth chewing (my mother would have been horrified!). Again: just as well I can wield chopsticks! We each had the inevitable bowl of rice and dipped into the communal plates for varying meats and vegetables. Staff sometimes had a tendency to pick up choice pieces of meat (or whatever) and just drop them into my bowl of rice for me…of course, the fact that they used chopsticks that had just been in their mouth was neither here nor there. An inherent aspect in the local cooking of meat is that the cooks do not remove any bones; they just chop through them all and cook, so there are shards of bone throughout the meat - a bit tricky with shattered chicken bones (and using chopsticks). Consuming basic, local food in a four-star restaurant!
I was very kindly invited to my previous client’s ‘Homestead’ 65km from Hanoi for a weekend; it really was great to catch up with them all. The owner’s son came with us (he was on leave from studying in America) and he gave the staff some lessons on making cocktails. Great fun was had taste testing! Then they had a shot at making ice cream with bananas, peanuts and coconut cream - but I left before a finished/frozen product taste test! I would receive email entreaties from them to assist with correcting translations for promotional material from Vietnamese to English - more than happy to oblige - just part of the job; I always tell my clients that I’m only as far away as a computer and email!
I had dinner one night with the in-country manager from Cambodia of the volunteer agency I’m with (he was in Hanoi for a meeting), who I consider a personal friend, and we had a great time catching up. He told me that he had recently spoken to one of my former hotel clients from 1994. He was told that they were still using some of the systems I had set up; they had expanded with some new hotels, and put their success down to their control systems. SORRY - a bit of mindless self-gratification there….!
I was thinking a while back that, on an average volunteer assignment I would have contact with 20-30 staff; so that would be a total approaching 1,000 people on which I have had an influence (to varying degrees of course) - just the last 20 years.
Like youth internationally, the restaurant staff had a predilection to hear the noise coming out of speakers (I’m reluctant to call it ‘music’) on the rather loud side. It was disappointing to note that the more western style of said noise comprised of a repetitious thumping sound, accompanied by a few words (that could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called ‘lyrics’) repeated over and over.
I very rarely consume anything from a hotel mini-bar. The hotel in Hanoi included what seemed to be a canned beverage called ‘BIRD'S NEST with White Fungus’. The ingredients did state that they included 'white fungus' and 'bird's nest'! Plus there was something in a can that was not named in English but seemed to be related to 'welcome’. The contents included: glutinous rice, red bean, peanut, and logan. It did say 'open before serving' - which is probably always a good idea - and the contradictory instruction: 'better serve with ice or hot'!!!
Next door to the restaurant was a motorcycle repair business that was doing a brisk trade every day - his ‘workshop’ was the pavement by the narrow road.
While Vietnamese public servants can tend to work a 5-day week, there is really no semblance of the definition of ‘weekends’ - trade goes on every day, and well into the night. In fact the restaurant could get by with minimal stocks of wines, for instance, because they could telephone the supplier until 9pm any night and order even one bottle of wine which would promptly be delivered by motorcycle. Fruit and vegetables were ordered one day and delivered the next (no additional charge on the market price). I queried the potential saving of going to the market themselves but, apparently, that’s not what ‘chefs’ do (!) and their supplier guaranteed fresh produce (or delivery was refused) and meat had a government certificate of quality and freshness (but I’d worry about the authenticity).
The restaurant had a security guard on duty on the street - he slept on the premises overnight (opened the roller shutters from the inside when I arrived around 8.15 every morning) and was there until close, which could be until midnight.
Gender does not seem to be a major factor - gangs working on road construction, sweeping or garbage collection could equally be female as male. One day a gang was filling potholes on our narrow road with tar coated aggregate - the road was not closed or the traffic controlled, vehicles just dodged around the workers.
Apparently, constantly repetitious, deep, loud, nasal-rattling snorts are acceptable behaviour - even from an otherwise demure young woman - but, it’s rather disconcerting in a tiny office!
There was a local restaurant across the road and along a few shops from *my* restaurant. The rice and some other elements of their meals were cooked in coal briquette-powered small ‘stoves’ located on the narrow pavement. They would lift the lids and merrily stir these various meal components during the day with traffic trundling past along the narrow road - perhaps the pollution and exhaust fumes enhanced the flavour with some added zest? I was watching a woman stirring the food one morning; she leaned right over pots and gave three hearty sneezes …yet more added zest?
There is a trend in Hanoi for the wealthy locals to steer away from street stalls from a fear of potential food poisoning. Street stalls sell pho (noodle soup) for around a $1 but the wealthy are paying up to $40 (some allegedly serving Kobe beef). They are paying up to $1,500 to feed six people (which is equivalent to the average Vietnamese annual income). They can pay $1,000 for a bottle of wine, $40 for a packet of cashew nuts, or $150 for lobster…!!!
When speaking to someone involved in construction, he said that he’d been to a politician’s home to do some work. The exterior of the building looked almost like a hovel, but inside it was more like a palace …presenting a ‘face’ to the public?
The Vietnamese army is an interesting institution. There are some 455,000 regulars and 5 million reserves. The organisation is into commercial enterprises like retail, they even own a bank. They operated 140 businesses, including: coffee, coal, garments, stockbroking, telecommunications and health services generating US$2 billion per year in revenue (3% of Vietnam’s GDP). I guess that you would not want to be a privately-owned business competing against them? http://www.scribd.com/doc/17313967/Thayer-Vietnam-Peoples-Army-Modernization-and-Development
The guy who was the restaurant’s GM was from an organisation that laudably provides start-up capital and business expertise for new enterprises in under-developed countries (Small Giants). He went to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) a few days after I arrived and was in touch by email when he could; then we heard that he was heading for Myanmar.
With less than two weeks of the assignment to go, the ‘operations manager’ (a pretty switched on local gal), went to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) for several days; and she asked me to be her ‘eyes’ while she was away.
Still, it was not like my Tonga experience where the manager asked me to look after the main, government-owned, hotel in Nuku’alofa for a few days and then shot through to a hotel conference in Germany for a month!
The little office was located on the top floor of the restaurant, above the kitchen. When the air-conditioner failed; perspiration would literally be running down my flanks in virtual streams.
All the zeros in the currency made for an interesting request from the accountant one day - she needed to pay someone cash and the safe was locked. She said to me: “Can I borrow a million?” “Sure, no problem.” Delve into wallet for a bunch of notes!
Another volunteer had been scheduled to arrive in Hanoi to tackle an assignment. Unfortunately, less than a week before she was due to fly out, the client informed her that they were going into liquidation and the assignment was cancelled. It was very disappointing for her - but she came to Hanoi a few weeks later anyway and we caught up for dinner. I was told that there are many businesses going into liquidation in Vietnam - perhaps a ‘run-on-effect’ of the so-called ‘Global Financial Crisis’.
Left the hotel in Hanoi at 9am where it would have been around 35°C- arrived home at around 1am next morning - to 5°C.
Good to get back to QUIET - no traffic noise or multiple whirring air conditioners.
The first meal I cooked for myself was grilled, medium-rate, Scotch fillet steak smothered with onions, tomato and mushrooms, with vegetables and mashed potato - no rice!
Only 15 photos this time! https://picasaweb.google.com/116314286847914749962/HanoiPotsNPans?authkey=Gv1sRgCMGi292cmcLXogE# Click on Slideshow….