Thursday Thoughts from Hoi An

First and foremost, check out John's mug.  Smooth at last!  Smooth at last!  Thank God Almighty, he's smooth at last! I am under no illusion that this will last more than one day, but I am enjoying the reprieve from weird-speckled-beard guy.

John and I started Vietnamese lessons last night.  Hoo Boy.  We've got a lot of work to do.  Either the other people in the class have already had lessons, or we are extremely dense.  We've been here for nearly two months and have a generous vocabulary of about eight words and/or phrases (at times spoken with random intonation that completely changes the meaning of the phrase).  This is verging on pathetic.  After an hour in class, I now can confidently say that I have a vocabulary of about ten phrases, and I am petrified to say anything to anyone for fear of offending them with the wrong personal pronoun.

One little cultural tidbit that I did glean from the confusion was the fact that it's better to call someone "old" in Vietnam than it is to insult them by guessing that they are "young."  Quite the opposite from home.  I would never dream of saying, "Good Morning Grandma" to a middle aged woman I didn't know.  She'd probably clobber me with her purse.  Here, though, "Good Morning Grandma," is bound to illicit a sweet, black-toothed grin and a "Good Morning" back. Old is respectful.  Young is disrespectful.  Always assume someone is old.

One other interesting tidbit that I picked up is that there are ten different ways to say "mother" in Vietnamese.  One of them is Ma (sounds like a sheep).  Before arriving in Vietnam, I learned that Ma has six different meanings in Vietnamese, and I speculated that Mama would increase the number of possible meanings exponentially.  However, I did not know that there are also ten different ways to say "mother."  I can't do the math, but my brain hurts just imagining the possibilities.  Perhaps we will actually learn what those ten words are in next week's lesson, but for now I am happy to just practice bleating like a sheep and pretending I'm a regular Vietnamese pro.  I'm afraid to complicate things and unintentionally disrespect someone's mother. 

Bricks for the house

In other news from the rice paddy: We have a house going up next door.  We were under the impression that it was a new road/path for the first two weeks.  Then it started to resemble a foundation.  We did some more gesturing with the neighbors and think we have ascertained that it is, in fact, a house.  It looks as though we'll practically share a wall (which would explain why we have no windows on one side of the house).  Wouldn't it be handy to speak Vietnamese so we could figure out what one brings to a house warming party in the paddy?

All of the fish in our living room pond are dead.  Is this a bad sign?  We claim no responsibility as it seems that fish are not equipped to live in a pond full of saw dust (and we had no part in creating the saw dust).  We did remove the initial five fatalities from the water because we had no other way to explain to Mr. Bang that his fish had died.  We had to give him the visual aid.  The sixth fish was a survivor, but he(?) eventually succumbed as well.  No one has been motivated to scoop the poor guy(?) out, so he's slowly decomposing.  John suggested we wait until Halloween and play a game of "bobbing for fishy."  I just rolled my eyes and suggested he deal with it in his spare time. 

Apart from dead fish and a microscopically expanded Vietnamese vocabulary, not much else is new.  We continue to battle ants and lizard poop.  We're learning to switch on the water heater in advance of a shower and to leave the fan blowing on the laundry overnight if we ever want our clothes to dry. The rain comes and goes.  We found baking powder and vanilla extract in Danang (major score) and some cool sand dollars on the beach.  Every day is an adventure - bargaining for fruit and eggs at the market, finding the photocopy shop buried in an alley, trying to locate an air pump to blow up flat bike tires, and learning how to transport everything from large bins to 5 gallon water containers on the back of a bicycle.  Mostly we just eat a lot and try to soak it all in.  Life is good.

My favorite Hoi An View: Black forest cake at an outdoor table at
Cargo, the pastry shop, with my orange bike getting washed in the rain. 

Had to chase the black forest cake with peanut butter
chocolate chip cookies back at the ranch.