Failure Week

This has not been our best week. Don't worry, we're fine. But several things this week have not worked out as we planned. That includes me blogging right now, but I will get to that.

It all began on Sunday, February 1. Our plan was to go to Hoi An, a city about 45 minutes away with lots of historic sites and great food. We specifically chose February 1 because it was the full moon. Each month on the full moon, Hoi An has a lantern festival at night. We went in the day, planning to stay through the night and see the lanterns.

The (very crowded) Japanese Covered Bridge of Hoi An

But things didn't work out that way. We made it to Hoi An without a problem. But it was raining. We had brought our umbrellas, but when you have to carry an umbrella, it is so much harder to also hold and use a phone for pictures or looking at a walking tour map. The sites just weren't nearly so neat to see in the rain. We saw a few. Of particular note is the Japanese Covered Bridge, but man was it crowded (with people who wanted to be out of the rain, I suppose.)

We did have an excellent lunch, but we found it pretty boring in Hoi An. So we ditched early. Not a super successful trip.

Taking a lesson from this sculpture in Hoi An. shrugging and saying "Whatevs."

On Tuesday, February 3, we visited a vaccine clinic. It isn't that we specifically needed any vaccines, but we wanted a couple. They are affordable in Vietnam and we figured we may as well get vaccines for Japanese Encephalitis and Yellow Fever. Again, there is no real danger right now that we are going to get those diseases. But there are some places we could travel in the future that require Yellow Fever vaccinations, and there are parts of East Asia where one can, if out in the more rural areas, get Japanese Encephalitis. From what we had read online, the people at the clinic were excellent English speakers. That turned out not to be true. Still, we communicated enough to make it clear what we wanted. They didn't have any Yellow Fever vaccines available. And they told us (I think, assuming I am interpreting it correctly) that if we wanted Japanese Encephalitis vaccines, we had to go to a hospital. However, it wasn't a total loss. The building had a very decorative banister for the staircase. (I'm really stretching to find the bright side.)

That is quite the banister, am I right?

Taking a break from griping, I did see a few amusing and interesting things this week.

Did you know Baskin Robbins makes soda?

The store is called Mickey & Minnie, but the character is Hello Kitty! More shrugging.

I understand that because the number 13 is unlucky, they don't have a 13th floor. But unlike in the USA, they don't just skip it. They call it floor 12A. But if you look carefully at the elevator buttons, what I don't understand is why there is a floor 36A. They have both floors 36 and 37. Why the extra?

12A, okay, but 36A? Huh?

But the most annoying nuisance of the week began last night, or technically early this morning. Alrica had a work meeting at 12:30 AM today, Saturday, which seems weird. But consider time zones. That was really 9:30 AM Friday in Pacific Time. The point is, she happened to be up at that time. And during her meeting she got a text from our landlord. The landlord sold the apartment we are staying in. And they wanted us to move, today, Saturday.

The landlord has another apartment on the top floor of this same building. Maybe that sounds great! But the downside to being on the upside is that you wait so much longer for elevators. We saw the other apartment this morning and we said, fine, we will move. (We could fight about it, saying the new owner has to honor the lease agreement, but given I know almost no Vietnamese, and it would probably cost me something to get an attorney, it's easier to just move.)

So we were supposed to move about 1.5 hours ago. We had everything arranged, and we had packed everything up. You might think, "Big deal, Erich. You and Alrica pack all the time. This can't be that hard." And you are right. And you are also wrong.

Yes, we do pack all the time, but we only pack our permanent things. Our clothing, toiletries, electronics, etc. But when you are staying in an apartment for five weeks, you buy food for the refrigerator. You buy cooking oil and salt and rice. (And when you buy rice in Southeast Asia, you are buying at least five kilogram bags which is around 11 pounds for those not in the metric know.) And then there are things that can't easily travel by plane, like liquid handsoap and lotion. And perhaps biggest and heaviest of all: water. You don't drink the tap water in Da Nang. So we have bottles of water and they have to get moved too. The point is that there is a lot more to move than when we are relocating from one city to another.

We had agreed on a time to meet our landlord and move up to the other apartment. We packed everything. And she didn't show up. Now we aren't moving until 3 hours after we had agreed to. But I can't just leave the items from the refrigerator and freezer packed. So we had to unpack. And I got my computer back out. And I needed a charger. And so on. We're doing the landlord a favor by being easygoing about this. But right now I am frustrated. This is not how I planned to spend my entire Saturday.

Hopefully next week will be less fail-y. You know the saying, there's nowhere to go but up. Two problems with it though: I'm not that low. It wasn't a terrible week, just had a few unsuccessful moments. And I'm moving to the top floor. So really there's nowhere to go but down. What does that portend?

Essential Characteristics

If you were going to build a bridge over a river, and you were going to make the suspension arches look like the body of a dragon complete with scales, and you were going to include the dragon's underbelly on the underside of the bridge, and one end of the bridge would be a dragon tail and the other would be a dragon head, and you were going to name it Cầu Rồng which means Dragon Bridge, so that's a lot things you were going to do, what else would you do to totally sell it, complete the dragonness of the entire thing? What is the essential characteristic of a dragon?

The dragon's head

I think that the essential characteristic of a dragon is breathing fire. Yes, for those into D&D (like me), some dragons breath other things: acid, ice, electricity, poison, but setting that aside, classical dragons breathe fire. So if you were building such a bridge, wouldn't you want it to breathe fire?

The dragon's underbelly

If you are the Vietnamese government, the answer is yes. The Dragon Bridge of Da Nang breathes fire. I know, that sounds dangerous. But no worries. It doesn't breathe fire all the time. It does it at 9:00 PM on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays and some holidays also. Alrica and I went to see it happen last night.

The bridge is closed to traffic during the ten minute display. Though they let cars go along the bridge right up until the fire begins. Like, cars didn't stop entering the bridge until about ten seconds before the fire began. First, you see a fire light in the mouth of the dragon. Then in intervals, it blasts out like a flame thrower for about 15 seconds. Then it goes back to just being in the mouth, but a minute later it blasts out again.

Make a save versus breath weapon!

This happens a few times and then the fire goes out. After that, the dragon sprays water out of its mouth. Like the fire, this happens in bursts and then there are pauses in between. The pauses are a bit shorter for the water.

The water is a bit harder to see than the fire, but I think you can tell what's going on.

Seeing it happen was cool, very cool even. I applaud Vietnam's commitment to completing the draconic features of the bridge. But this was not the most amazing experience Alrica and I had last night.

We walked from our apartment to the bridge. It was maybe a 35 minute walk. We planned to stop somewhere and eat. But endeavoring to not only see the restaurants designed for tourists and expats—there are so many foreign people in Da Nang—we turned on various smaller streets. And along the way we passed an unassuming restaurant called Quán Nhậu Hồng Hải, but it was crammed full of people. All of them were locals. So we figured it had to be good. We went in and got a table for two.

I took this picture on the way home. The restaurant was a lot busier when we arrived.

Lucky for us, there was one waiter there who did speak English. He brought us a menu that was in Vietnamese, English, and Mandarin. (I think it might have been their only copy of the trilingual menu.) He advised us to try two of their bestsellers: fried oysters and fried scallops. We agreed. Then we sat back and just enjoyed the scene. There was so many happy groups, chatting in Vietnamese, laughing, one of them even had a waitress get a picture of them together. At the table next to us were two middle-aged men enjoying Tiger Beer. A plate came to their table and they started speaking to the waiter (not the one who spoke English.) I saw one of them gesturing to Alrica and me. Eventually that waiter came over and set down the plate, two fish, like the whole fish, fried and served with some green leafy vegetable and a bowl of a green sauce that turned out to be based on chili peppers. He got out his cell phone and used a translation app to show me that this plate was being given to us by the two men at the table beside us and they had already paid for it. I said thank you to the waiter and to the two men (several times) which is one of the few phrases I know in Vietnamese.

But the question arose, how are you supposed to eat this? There are no forks. There are only chopsticks. How do you eat an entire fish (head, eyes, and scales still on it) using only chopsticks? Well, we muddled through. It was pretty easy to peel away the scales. And the meat inside was so tender it came off the skeleton easily as we gripped it with our chopsticks. I did get the occasional bone in my mouth, and I did move it to the front of my mouth with my tongue and use my fingers to get it back down to the plate. But for most of my bites, I didn't have that problem. I enjoyed the green sauce, Alrica found it a bit spicy. And the green leafy vegetable, I don't know what it was, but it had that pungent effect of horseradish or wasabi. I liked that too.

So we are doing great with our fish, right? And our scallops and oysters arrived a bit later and they were amazing! Alrica was in love in the scallops. I think she is more in love with me that the scallops, but that could just be optimistic yearning on my part. But back to the fish. I finished eating half of it, the half facing up. You could see the main spine and all the bones coming out and under that was the other half of the meat. So here's the question? How do you get to the other half? Do you try to pick out the skeleton (with chopsticks)? Do you flip the fish over (again with chopsticks)? I went for the latter, flipping it. I didn't fully succeed. I ended up using my fingers to assist in the flippage.

Incidentally, this entire meal, the oysters, the scallops, and bottles of water for each of us, cost us less than ten dollars. Phenomenally good seafood for under ten dollars? Pretty spectacular.

When the men at the next table got up to leave, we also stood. We shook their hands and thanked them again. They said some things to us which we didn't understand. But they stopped the one waiter who spoke English, and had him translate. They wanted to know how we enjoyed the fish and we told them it was fantastic.

Why did these two men send of a plate of two whole fish to strangers? I don't know, but I think they wanted us to experience some of the real flavors of Vietnam. I think they were excited to see some of the foreigners in this restaurant which probably serves locals 99.8 percent of the time. Or maybe they realized, by the time it was served, that they just didn't want it. Whatever their reason, it was super generous and kind. It made the entire experience unexpected and heart-warming. And we super appreciate it.

Isn't having unexpected (and hopefully, at times, heart-warming) experiences what you hope for in travel? Maybe, if I'm not overstating things too much, it is one of travel's essential characteristics.

First Impressions of Da Nang

My, my, I haven't posted in a while. Well, apologies for that. Let's catch up.

We spent most of January in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Our daughter was with us for half that time, and then it was back to the two of us for the other half. Today is Tuesday and this past Sunday we flew out of Kuala Lumpur and into Da Nang, Vietnam. First, where is that? Well, Da Nang is on the coast along the East Vietnam Sea. It is close to the middle of Vietnam in the north-south sense, with Hanoi being in the northern part and Ho Chi Minh City in the southern part. Da Nang has a beach, it's near the mountains, and it has a river, the Han River, running through it. 

So far, we really like Da Nang. But our Monday was spent in trying to find a place to live. We are staying in a hotel, the Hilton Da Nang. This is a fantastic hotel, very comfortable with a beautiful pool and an amazing breakfast. (It is surprising how much more thorough and extravagant hotel breakfasts are outside of the United States.) But we set out to find an apartment. And I think we have one. This afternoon we should be moving in.

The Han River Bridge showing off

Our hotel is just across the street from the river. There is a lovely river walkway including sculptures and views of the bridges. Our hotel is very close to the Han River Bridge which lights up in a colorful display at night. Further downriver is the Dragon Bridge which looks like a dragon. I've read that at certain times, the dragon's head breathes fire. We will definitely have to go see that! It is supposed to happen at 9 PM sharp on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.

The Dragon Bridge (orange, but it changes)

One lovely aspect about Vietnam is cheese. And bread. Two, two lovely aspects of Vietnam are cheese and bread. Vietnam was colonized by the French, and when the French left, the Vietnamese held on to the bread and cheese. You don't realize how much you miss those things until you are in parts of the world where they are uncommon. We actually went out for pizza our first night here. I was craving pizza near the end of our time in Kuala Lumpur. And you can get pizza there. But Alrica pointed out that Da Nang has lots of pizza places, so we bade our time. And it was worth it. Great pizza!

I suspect she turned to stone because she was out of the water too long

I know, you're saying "Erich, your first night in Vietnam and you had pizza?" Yes, you're right, but I have plenty more chances for stir-fries, pho, and spring rolls. In fact, I had pho as part of my breakfast today, and it was good! Plus, we had banh mi (Vietnamese sandwiches) for dinner on our second night.

The temperatures have been great! Generally in the 70s, which is so lovely, though the Vietnamese find it chilly. It does rain off and on, but when it is sunny, the city sparkles.

And wow! Amazing fire hydrants. I've found three different styles already.

Flat Yellow Top, Two Small side fonts

Different colors, different covers, taller and thinner

Short and squat with a high crown

I will have more to post once we are settled.