Vietnam as Nammers Know It

 Inevitably, I found myself at my old Taekwondo school to visit old friends, my old grand master Thay Hợp…and for a few practices, that is if I call my feeble attempt to keep up a practice.

 Taekwondo kids lining up on asphalt-covered parking lot by the hundreds. Smelly hogus and doboks. Frog-jumping until your knees jarred to a mess and your soles bleed. The worshipping of well-deserved blackbelts. The techniques repeated into the thousands of times. Practicing in almost complete darkness when there is no electricity. All seem very familiar to me: I was one of these kids more than a decade ago…ok a little bigger.

 Thay Hop introduced me in front of the class as “one former student of many years back, and now is in instructor in the US”. I wish he’d added “but he’s older now, and he’s probably here just to observe and see how we do things these days, not to be thoroughly drilled with our National Team members…” But of course he didn’t say that. So I got a taste of the old times.

 But I am not like old times any more.

 Years of being pampered on matted floor and relatively easy training in the US has turned me into a soft city boy. I can’t slide on asphalt without feeling every inch of my feet sole being peeled away. I can’t knee-jerk continously for 10 minutes without feeling like my knee will pop any second. At the very point when I was devising a plan to escape the bone-jarring drills , I was saved by Bao…my old under-classmate who is now the underboss of the school. He wanted to catch up on things, and perhaps show off a bit by walking around the classes acting like, well, the underboss.

Tomorrow @ 5 am we’ll do it again, athough this time it will be only with Bao and his 20 team members….and it will be in a matted room! I really want to be whipped into a proper Vietnamese Taekwondoer again.

But I will be on the road soon…where fatty food and cold beer awaits.

I remember waking up around 4 am, feeling slightly surprised that I was still alive. The first thing I did was looking down to make sure that my clothes were still in tact – good. Head feels like it’s been hit repeatedly by a blunt object. I dragged myself to the bathroom. Staring at having-a-bad-hair-day ghost in the mirror, I grinned…a piece of vegetable stuck in my teeth. I did it – I survived Satuday night drinking with old friends, who had promised a proper drinking session upon my return. 

“Dang Cap La Mai Mai!”

The now-popular catch phrase in Vietnam means, translated loosely, “A Ranking is Forever!”. How well you hold your liquor is apparently called “dang cap“ (a ranking) these days. It is a term also used to rank how well you do other things: play soccer, how well you screw your girlfriend, how fast you can get from A to B on scooters, etc. When it comes to drinking, if your dang cap is high, you can probably last through a Saturday night with old friend and still remain vertical for a hot bowl of noodle by mid-night. If your dang cap is zero, you’d most likely wake up in a slimy bathroom of a local Karaoke shop around 4 am.

 Like a lot of stupid things men do, drinking excessively and not passing the glass as it comes by has a lot to do with pride – you don’t want to appear wimpish…you would rather crawl in dog’s #2 all the way home than to beg for forgiveness as any additional drop of alcohol would immediately be rejected by your over-tolerant body.

Vietnamese Drinking Tip #1: When you are almost at the point of no return, you must pour very carefully to not spill…or over fill your cup, which you must drink. In this picture, Hieu did the pouring for Thang.

Tip #2: you can compare glasses, scruntinize every discrepancy….argue whose glass is fuller…to make sure it’s fair game – you dont want that extra drop to make you the first to abandon ship

When you drink with friends during World Cup in Vietnam, you have an objective and sacred obligation: to not pass out before the lineup around 10:00 pm. You gotta stay upright until arriving at a location equipped with a TV…if you need help, that’s what good friends are for:

Pho & Duc providing much-needed support for a good friend named Tuan. He didn’t quite it make it to line-up time.

But a couple of hours later…Pho was down on the floor of the Karaoke joint…but according to friends, he fought valiantly!

On the bright side of things: I missed the chaotic 14 Yellow Cards + 4 Red Cards game. I like to blame the Russian ref for being so easy at first, letting the players take over and things get chaotic. I also blame my drinking problem on the USA’s loss to Ghana, a country I am sure only 0.1% of the population can find on the map.

Location: Long Hai, S. Vietnam 

I really don’t want my first picture from Vietnam is one of me lying helpless & shit-faced in complete and stupendous inebriation on the floor of a Karaoke shop, so here’s one of the many salt dune recently harvested along Long Hai, a coastal town relatively free of tourists 3.5 hours away from HCM City.

 Not all salt tastes the same. Vietnamese sea salt tastes relatively mild compared to the Morton version popular in the US – and with a hint of the sea. To make it, you need a clean flat surface, let the sea water in, retain it & let the water evaporate, then what is left is raw salt…which is then swept up into dunes like the one pictured. Of course this salt is not white yet – they’ll roast it in large pans first before it’s a finished product. I like the local version of Mexican chilli salt: salt, red chilli, and ground dried shrimp all roasted together, then mortared into a consistently rough power. It’s good with slightly sour fruits like grapefruit, pineapple, green mango…

 Tomorrow, we’ll talk about some of the other foodstuff I’ve had in the past 24 hours: a cobra’s heart still beating, stir-fried sea snake, cobra’s blood liquor…though I must confess that a couple of those items were semi-force-fed. I also ate some dog meat – one can not survive on snakes alone.

(To Hector - thanks for covering me while I am away)

What time is it?

I hear street sweeping. Must be around 5 am. The street sweepers get up before the joggers. The joggers get up before the mad-house traffic. That’s how it works. Everyone runs here in Saigon. And everyone wants the front of their shops or residences cleaned by opening time. And by street-sweepers, I literally mean people who sweep the streets with brooms all – over the city – some are paid, and some are not.

It must have rained last night. The air smells crisp and cool. We slept with the balcony doors wide-open. 

My brother’s two bed-room apartment complex in Saigon is in lock-down mode past 12 am – no one can get in (at least not without a small bribe). The shirtless security guards were in a happy mood from the soccer game and rice wine, so they let us in for free. 

I am in Vietnam alright.So I must have slept for about 3 hours. Now I am wide-awake typing this.