Pocket Explosions

I'm walking around the corner for my mid-morning sandwich, and order my usual, an omelet with scallions, which the sandwich lady normally cooks on a portable gas grill smaller than a 45rpm. 

This morning, she cracked an egg into her skillet, but the flames sputtered for only a few seconds, leaving my egg...still an egg, and not an omelet. I went for the cha and pork floss sandwich instead, and walk a few feet to the coffee lady. Co-worker is there, ordering a coffee for himself and looking over the cigarette cartons. 

I moan about no omelets while ordering a coffee, prompting him to go, "Oh, Sandwich Lady's butane ran out? Oh, that reminds me...tell Coffee Lady that her lighters (points at rows of yellow lighters with Hot Wheels stickers) explode when they're dropped!"

"What?!"

"Yeah, one even exploded in my pocket once!"

I spend a moment imagining Co-worker reacting to his pockets spontaneously combusting, but I figured I better alert Coffee Lady that her lighters were prone to...well, exploding.

But, it is old news.

"Oh, oh yeah. That happens. Sometimes when it gets too hot, they explode right in the display case."

  

Later I realized I never saw what Sandwich Lady did with my uncooked egg. 

 

Pardon me.

This is just to say

I have not posted here

for over 365 days; neurotically

I begin counting 

the months backward 

from May (14).

Forgive me, 2008

was so crazy,  but then again

aren't they all. 

Old School

When I went in to have my eyes checked, I hated the part where they would dilate your pupils because then I had to walk around with paper frames with tinted plastic sheets for lenses. I wish I could have told my nine-year-old self to get over it, because imagine walking around with these babies:


For the record, my dad's prescription is something near the upper bound of not-blind. Thanks for the genes, Dad!

This blog is 80% cat.

Favorite Fried Rice Joint

Three course meals consisting of French food are all very well and good (see Au Delice, post with the photogenic tomatoes), but sometimes you just have a yen for quick and filling fried rice, topped with slices of stirfried beef with cucumbers on the side, you know?

Rata-ewwwww

Lately, someone's been really putting away the shrimp paste for lunch. The hallway I pass through almost everyday at the studio reeks. I figure maybe one of the pregnant techs has just suddenly been on the mother of all pregnant binges, and I suppose shrimp paste ranks right up there with pickles and ice cream.

I'm griping about the smell to my co-worker as we walk up the stairs and are freshly assaulted again by the smell. Now, I've had shrimp paste before, but honestly, someone must have had a tub squirreled away for it to be so pungent and spread so thoroughly in that part of the building.

Co-worker: *wrinkles nose* Oh, that's so terrible.

Me: Yeah, I know. I mean, I have no problem with shrimp paste, but this is ridiculous.

*silence*

Co-worker: Um, Vi...a rat DIED somewhere in the walls and we have no idea where it is. You're confusing the smell of a rotting rat with shrimp paste? You've EATEN shrimp paste!

Me: >_<;

Faux pas part eleventytwo

A coworker and I are watching TV in the office, making catty remarks about the guests on the show. It's some sort of panel made up of women experts talking about the latest social evils to plague Vietnamese society.

Co-worker: She's not cute. Permanent bitchface.

Me: Yup, not cute.

Co-worker: Oh, look at her face, that one got plastic surgery.

Me: Freaky, her nose is like Michael Jackson's.

And so it goes, and I'm feeling good because we're just chatting like normal workbuddies stuck on the late shift.

Me: Oh, she is definitely not cute. Uggggg-ly!

Co-worker: *deadpan*...she's my sister.

Me: Waaaa?!? Really?

Co-worker: No, no, haha!

Me: Oh, haha, phew! You made me so scared!

Co-worker: By marriage. She's my...*switches to English* ...sister in law?

Me: Oh...um, yeah, that's right. That would be a sister-in-law.

Francesco and the Cat Horde

Francesco, Nicholas' cousin, flew over from Rome to visit for two weeks. We all liked him very much.


The kittens took a bit longer to warm up to him.


But they soon expressed their approval.

Spring Cleaning

Chuc mung nam moi everyone! Best of all, it's nam Mau Ty, the year of the rat, and in honor of the occasion, I bring you pictures of rat poop. Here, my coworker is all gloved up (I personally would have preferred a HAZMAT suit) and she gallantly enema'd the bookshelves, emerging triumphantly with the results:


Trust me, you do not want to take a closer look at the contents of that box.


At work, we take our cleaning seriously.

Dedication

Seen by Nicholas on a theater playbill: "Ho Nguyet was a fox who acquired the power to turn into a human after knocking herself up for a thousand years."

Au Delice

Sometimes all you need to perk up the gray skies are some tomatoes. With feta and some zippy olive oil with lemon!

Not that I'm leaning in any way...

but this is a particularly amazing un-shopped photo, no?



Courtesy of the NYTtimes.

Banking Benefits

Managing your banking affairs when you're 14 time zones away can be a real pain. Even though all my meager assets are socked away online, and I can make customer service calls through Skype, not having an actual functioning bank branch here in Hanoi has put many a crick into my neck. Plus, there's the added complication of getting paid in Vietnamese dong (VND), which can only be used in Vietnam. I can't make direct wire transfers to my American accounts without first withdrawing my VND, exchanging that, and then sending it through Western Union, all the while getting nipped in the liver by usurious vultures along the way. It burns my miserly heart.

On the other hand, how many of you have banks that come with your very own personal Kitchen God, huh?!

A Total Invasion of Privacy

As mentioned in the last post (so long ago!), a cat of mine had kittens. Two. A high-pitched mew coming from the top shelf of my closet alerted me to the fact that Boots, the orange cat, had not only been in the family way, but had given birth to a single, scrunchy-faced kitten. Later, at 2 a.m., out dropped the second one. Naturally, in light of such excitement, I was all up my cat's uterus with my camera.

Here she is, Emmy on the left shooting a "Do you mind?!" in my direction.





P.S. Let me clarify that our previous landlady was convinced that Emmy was pregnant, due to her...well, she's definitely a meo beo. No Vietnamese kitty is so spoiled as Emmy, even though we constantly dangle things in front of her, hoping to get her to move. Mostly she just flops over, like it's not even worth the effort to mock us. Anyways, Emmy's been to the vet and back, and for a while we thought Boots was infertile, since the whole "in heat" phase kind of passed under our radar.

P.P.S. Isn't it peculiarly awesome that "fat cat" and "meo beo" both rhyme?

Things of Note

Some things need to be elaborated on:

1. I woke up yesterday and everyone was wearing helmets.
2. I went off on a motorbike trip with Hannah for 3 days to Cao Bang and back.
3. Said trip was very fun and exciting, and full of interaction, although Cao Bang itself was rather disappointingly bland.
4. I am contemplating tentative job offers.
5. My cat gave birth to two kittens in my suitcase. I'm sure they will be very cute.

Well, Haven't You?

Just Call Me Oliver

This week is unusual in that I'm eating a buffet lunch everyday at the swanky Nikko Hotel, for free.

Why? And how? By scamming my way into a television production workshop run by the Reuters Foundation. One of the advantages of being pathetic-looking is that you can play on people's sympathy with an exhibition of courageous pluck, such as when you're begging to be let into a class that only runs in Hanoi every six years (yes, it does help your presentation to be thinking "Please, sir, can I have some more?").


That photo sequence is a story on the theme of "Lost and Found". Our sequence was the best, mostly because a closeup meant to emphasize the loss of a scarf actually turned out to emphasize a group member's generous bust size. That particular photo went missing later.


That's Lloyd Watson. He looks like Daniel Craig, and is very used to working with translators. This means he speaks with a lot of pauses. When I first introduced myself, he thought I was the translator. Unfortunately, I am no where near qualified to be a translator. Lloyd was explaining that a series of photos were actually stills taken from footage, which I identified as screencaps.

Lloyd: "Yes, exactly. Can you say that in Vietnamese for them?"

Vi: *dies on the inside*

There actually was a misunderstanding about translators; the people in my department were given to understand, based on the information handed out to us, that the class was open to people who had enough command of English to make translators unnecessary. Some other people in the class didn't get the memo and consequently a colleague spent her first day of class as an impromptu simultaneous translator, which is ball-breaking work, eye-twisting work for which you normally get paid loads of money.

I gave her some some coma-inducing dessert instead:

50,000 Words

For the past few weeks I've been hanging out in the teachers' room at Nathan's school, mostly because I happened to have a lot of free time. That was spent mostly dinking around with some new programs, or maybe subtitling. What I was really doing, though, was putting off what I always imagined I'd do when I found myself with substantial blocks of free time; obviously, that'd be producing a staggering work of genuis, or napping.

I do think I should take more naps, by the way.

What's about nice about wanting to be continually motivated and inspired is that I'm pretty much surrounded by people who pretty much amaze me everyday. For Friday's Example of Amazingness, my housemate, Hannah, cobbled together a band she insists is "jazz funk" and two months later they played a gig at an annual charity fundraiser, overcoming truly ridiculous obstacles (bassist broke his ankle 48 hours before, and another drummer had to go back Australia on short notice). It didn't matter; at the end people were dancing and generally having a great time and begging for encores until Jess, the lead singer, simply said "We have no more."


It also helped that, in their moment of need, Dan, an unassuming Canadian, mentioned that he was a classically trained guitarist. Those Canadians and their modest ways...

Despite being surrounded, I still yet have written anything like I used to in college. (This, of course, is maybe a good thing.) More accurately, I've not yet sat down and seriously tried to do anything creative. Good thing Hannah has roped us all in to National Novel Writing Month then.

As the name suggests, we're taking on the insane task of producing a novel in a month. The guidelines require that the finished products (ha!) need to be at least 50,000 words long (ha!).

I think that it is likely that I will be napping less.

Jelly Belly

The bloom is off the rose and changes are afoot. Or is that in the air? I can never keep my figures of speech straight.

Speaking of change and figures, one of the kindly techs pinched some of my belly flab the other day and pegged my weight gain to the kilo. She said I'd been looking a little too skinny, which I found confusing, because most Vietnamese girls make beanpoles look like Sophia Loren. However, I could definitely do without the added roundness; luckily, Thu, while rubbing my tummy at a book signing (as one does) noted that it was very soft, which meant it would be easier to get rid of.

She's a yoga instructor. Have you ever seen a fat yoga instructor?

A Rip in the Space-Time Continuum...

must have been where August and September disappeared to, because I blinked in July while on a plane and opened my eyes to find that I'm more than a quarter of the way through October. The other day I caught myself absently wondering when the weather changed, for the rainier, the muggier, the Seattler.

It's kind of nice.

I've taken to liberally drinking coffee mixed with condensed milk. Less you wonder how this is any different from my normal routine, let me explain; it's Vietnamese coffee. I used to steal my father's mug of coffee as he read the newspaper and I read the Sunday comics. In college, on the Ave, I ordered a Vietnamese-style coffee at a specialty tea and coffee cafe because I had never before seen Vietnamese coffee advertised as being Vietnamese, like it was something unusual or hand-roasted by Colombian priestesses. The barista hesitated before warning me that a cup of the Vietnamese coffee was equivalent to six shots of expresso.

I had always wondered why Starbucks coffee never really seemed to induce a caffeine high.

At any rate, despite (or perhaps because of) this longstanding history with strong coffee, I don't remember drinking an awful lot of it in college. Mostly I preferred sports drinks and banana-flavored steamed milk. Unfortunately banana milk isn't packed full of stimulants, and lately I've been leaping before looking and running before walking, so this fall is looking pretty crazy. Crazy dangerous.

I'll have you know that I've become considerably less clumsy.