Fruit-n-Food

Michael (age 12):

Trip to Hoi An,

     The day was off to a good start. Today we will be taking a bicycle &boat tour of Hoi An. Our guide came over somewhere around 6, and we went and ate bun bo, beef soup. It seems to be the Vietnamese equivalent of hamburgers and pancakes combined! We went to one of the Da Dang - Hoi An bus stops, right next to the busy highway. It seems like every semi truck that passed us had to honk. Loudly.

       Finally the bus came and we climbed aboard. What we didn't know was that Vietnamese buses don't really come to a complete stop, so the bus started moving before I was fully on! 30 minutes of a Vietnamese bus ride is not pleasant. We made it to Hoi An in one piece, and got on our bikes. On the way to the river there was a crowded market with Bananas, Longons, Calamansi, Durian, Rombutans, Pumelo, Sugar Apples, Starfruit, Papaya, and Watermelon. Dad bought a bunch of Choui Bananas, and we boarded the boat.

        It was a small flat boat, with an open seating area, and all the motorcycles and bikes were brought on the deck. We ate the bananas, and about 5 minutes later we landed on Cam Kim island. We biked a little bit to one of the boat making shops. We found out that a small Vietnamese boat (15 ft) takes only 15 days to complete! After that was a longer bike ride, passing banana trees, water buffaloes, and several skinny chickens. 

       Eventually we came to a mat makers shop, where we found a woman sitting on a loom making a mat. Another woman would shove a piece of died grass through the strings, and the the one on the loom pulled a piece of wood back and shove the string in. we watched this for a couple minutes, then all the girls in the group tried. After they did it you got an idea about how experienced the two ladies were. Mom and dad liked the mats so much the bought 2! Also, there was a Pumelo tree outside, so the ladies picked one for us and we got on our bikes. 

Our next stop was a Chinese temple of the what's their face dynasty. There was not much about the temple, it was just your standard run-of-the mill ancestral temple. We left early because Dad was craving ice cream. We came to a shop that had jackfruit-flavored Popsicles, which are kind of hard to describe. On we went to a noodle-making shop. 

       To make rice noodles, first you take the outer layer off the rice, then you put the rice in a pot with water. After 10 hours you take the rice out and grind it and stain it into a rice paste. Then you spread the paste on a flat, heated surface and put a weight on it to press the paste. After you add a second layer you take the circle out to let it cool. After it cools you can cut it by hand or put it through a noodle maker.

After that we were off to the gift shop. There was a lot of cool stuff, and Anna bought a small wooden elephant. later we crossed into Hoi An, and ate at the Dingo Deli. Afterwards we bought a dragonfruit, got on a bus, and left for home.

On Hold ... Please Wait

Dear Mom,

Waiting is normal here.  I'm thinking of it because I'm currently sorting out a banking issue back home and on hold, and I'm LOVING the fact that Google Voice allows me to dial US numbers from my computer, from here, for free.  My USA phone number (the one that ends in 6197) still receives texts.  It means I use the green phone/messages app on my phone for local VN calling, and the blue Google Voice app for my US calling and messaging, and it's a delight to not be cut off from contact with home.

Anyhow, today I'm using Google Voice to dial the bank's 1-800 # from my computer, and I'm on hold, so I got to thinking about how much time is spent waiting here.

I remember when we were in China and for years afterwards, we called it "China Mode."  It's when we'd be standing in line at the grocery store, and we'd just go into passive mode.  Cease to look at the other lines to jockey for position--just let eyes glaze over and calmly ... wait.

I've told you before that once a foreigner gets angry here, the game is over.  I've never (never) seen a foreigner's anger do any good in Asia.  I'm the surrealistically tall and blond guy that has the problem, and my best bet is to smile and wait.  Waiting.  We wait for taxis to serendipitously drive by.  I'm currently waiting for the university to give me classes to teach.  The students that have paid extra to have a foreign teacher are waiting to get their foreign teacher.  This isn't a waiting for a specific date or time to come--this is the feeling of indefinite "going to come sometime" where you just make sure you've done your part and then stand and wait.  Think government offices where you need a stamp from someone but you don't know which stamp or which someone, and you just have to wait until someone takes pity on you and helps you out.  

A couple of days ago we toured Hoi An, which is a tourist city 30km to the south of Da Nang.  They've created an old-town which is barred from cars/trucks/taxis, so it's awash with bicycles and pedestrians.  And it's charming.  It made me want to wear a T-Shirt that says "I'm a Tourist, So Trap Me."  I've never seen that on a T-Shirt, but if I did, I'd buy it.

We wait for the bus to Hoi An, and then when it arrives my kids can't understand why there's so much rush to board the bus so it can careen southward again, barely stopping to pick up the passengers--the conductor leans out the back door of the bus and helps the waiting pregnant lady step onto the bottom step, then he calls to the driver and the driver puts pedal to the metal.  We may have had to wait for the bus, but once it comes there is zero waiting before it's going again.

Hurry to the tourism office to be on time for our 8:15 appointment.  Okay, thank you for coming.  Now wait while we go rent you some bicycles for the tour.  It's 8:40 and we're sitting still in front of the office fan and dripping sweat, and waiting.  The college student volunteering for the tour company is engaging us in conversation, and that's nice.  Bikes arrive, and we're off.  We wend our way through crowded-though-mostly-vehicle-free streets, and I perceive that my gang is going to start drooping if we have to wait for the ferry boat to take us out to the island we're touring, so I stop and buy a bunch of bananas.  These are the 3-inch-long kind, sweet and a little chewy.  Our ferry is just starting to load as we arrive and that means that after we've rolled our bikes across the narrow gap between boat and pier, we are able to achieve seats under the protective shade.  Latecomers may not have to wait as long, but they have to stand in the sun.  Luckily they all bring hoodies to shield their skin from the sun's blackening rays--in the enormously hot and humid weather of the day they're wearing hoodies!  Bananas gladly received all around, including the tour guides.

No waiting as we tour a boat-building street.  Did you know they use jackfruit wood?  That they soak the boards in the mud for a year and then join them with dry pegs/dowels that expand with moisture?  

No waiting as we pedal from there to a household where they are weaving grass mats.  $5 for a mat?  Sure!  I'm a tourist today, and I'm pleased to be parted with my money.  Make it two.  We feel good about supporting the local economy, we have two grass mats that tell a story, and we're really-really-really-really grateful that we don't have to make grass mats for a living.

No waiting as we pedal along raised concrete bike lanes from there over to a temple built by the local family.  Now it's getting hot, though, so the standing in the sun guessing why there are Chinese lions in front of the temple is wearing pretty thin for me.  The collegestudenttourguides know why they are in front of the temple, so it's not that we're just standing in the sun wondering about them on our own accord...finally I'm like "No, I'm not going to guess.  If you're going to tell me about the lions, let's stand in the shade and admire the lions from over here, but I'm done with guessing."  This wasn't our first guessing game of the morning, and the guessing games always seemed to follow the same pattern:

Tour Guide: Do you know what kind of wood they use to build the boats?

Chase Family: Um, no.  What kind?

Tour Guide: Guess!  <giggles and claps hands>

Chase Family: <game for this kind of thing> Okay, is it a nut tree, like betel nut wood?

Tour Guide: <giggles> No, keep guessing!

Chase Family: Bamboo, palm, fig?

Tour Guide: No! No! No!  It's not right.  Can you guess?  <smiles>

Chase Family: Why don't you tell us what wood they use?

Tour Guide: Can you guess?

Chase Family: No, I don't think we can guess.

Tour Guide:  It is Jack Fruit wood.

Chase Family:  Oh!  Jack Fruit wood, eh?  That's interesting!  What do they use to join the boards together?
Tour Guide: <giggles> Can you guess?

So it's not like I was grumpy right out of the gate with the guessing game, but it was wearing thin by the time we were in front of the lions.

Plus, I'm not a big temple-to-worship-ancestors fan.  To me it seems to be a spiritual slavery that I would prefer to see people set free from.  I'm still learning about the local belief systems, and I'm not trying to pass a premature judgment, and ultimately that judgment isn't mine to pass in any case.  But it seems like it's all tied in with "if I don't perform these customary rites and something bad happens to my business, I know it was because I failed in my duty."  Luck and un-luck, and a vague sense of spiritual afterlife that is best honored by the traditions handed down.  Still exploring, but temples are not my favorite thing.

Ice cream is a good alleviator of grumpy.  I don't know my prices yet, so when she told me each ice cream was 10,000 I was reaching for my wallet.  That's $.50, and I was a tourist for the day.  But my Viet friends intervened and we got ice creams for 7,000 VND.  That's still twice what they'd normally be in the city, but we were by this point far out in the countryside of an island near a tourist city... and she had ice cream and we wanted what she had.  So 7,000 it was, and the jackfruit fudgecicle was pretty okay.

We did have to wait for the next part of the tour, which was a stickyrice pancake making house.  They make 30 kilos of stickyrice pancakes each day and sell them in the market, and we got to help make some.  There was another group from the same tourism outfit ahead of us, so we stood on the back porch for a while and peeled and consumed a pomelo (gift of the lady who made grass mats).

I think my "I'm a Tourist, So Trap Me" grace was beginning to dissipate by then.  After stickyrice pancakes we finished up at the souvenir shop and I just stood (waiting) in one place in the shade, semi-comatose, dispensing cash to wife and kids as it was requested for the purchase of refrigerator magnets, fans, necessary wooden elephants, etc.  

We ferried bikes back across to the Hoi An mainland, parted ways with our tour guides, and rode across town to the famous Dingo Deli for western food, air conditioning, and waiting out the afternoon downpour.  

Upon returning bikes and walking to the bus station, we had NO WAITING for the bus.  It was actually pulling out of the station as we approached, and the conductor was waving to us to run forward and hop aboard to Da Nang.  So we trotted forward and boarded the bus, only to find out that the bus-station-departure was a bit of a ruse.  It stopped for us and rolled forward a bit more, hoping for some more customers.  Then it went a mile north and we stopped and waited.  We never found out what we waited for.  After 10 minutes or so of sitting and waiting, nothing happened.  But at 10 minutes or so of waiting we did fire up the engine and begin careening north, doing our rolling-stop to pick up passengers as the conductor swung them aboard and shouted a Viet "Go!!" to the driver.  Why did we wait and then scoot at breakneck pace?  We may never know.  That's just the way it is here, and it's an important skill to learn to just go passive and wait.  Ah, patience!

Bus rides, boat rides and biking, o my!

Posted from Daniel Chase (age 11)  8/28:

Bus rides, boat rides and biking, o my!

Today we took a tour of Hoi An that was 6 hours long.The first 2 hours were fun but then it got a little old.  Sometimes I think that when the motor bike company makes the bike they should disable the horn. What I'm saying here is that the Vietnamese use their horns a bit too much, a lot too much. The constant noise of honking is what I'm still getting used to. 

For some reason there are lots of Australians in Vietnam. We visited an Australian cafe in Hoi An and it was awesome! There was a playground in the back which had a trampoline.THAT was the awesome part. Also there was pancakes.

Some of you might know that my dream is to see or have a pet monkey.Not yet. Not in the third largest city in Vietnam. But I still hope to get one.

Anyway,about Hoi An. We foreigners have some bus advantages. Although I do feel guilty because when we got on someone was forced to move so we can sit down. The bus crashes through town at top speed and it only slows down to pick someone up. That was a bumpy experience. There is more to the tour than that, such as a boat or two, but this is all the patience I have for typing. 

_______________

Posted from Daniel Chase  8/14

Airplane rides are fun, but not for the fourth time. Somehow escalators, elevators and airplanes got boring. 

Although the fifth flight was way more interesting because of two words: first class. That was luxurious. The first city we went to in Vietnam was Saigon.  Of course, there was a huge difference between Saigon and Da Nang.  Saigon was crowded and smoggy.  It also had amazingly crowded streets.  I was relieved that we were going to live in Da Nang for two reasons:  1. It's a beach city. 2. It's way less crowded and the sky is clearer.  

Do we live in paradise?  

Or not? (this is our corner bike-repair guy)

Today is Friday the 14th and we have been in Vietnam for 5 days.  We have already gotten a house and new American friends.  So far, Vietnam has been a fun experience for me.  I love the heat of the ocean and the soft sand.  We call our house the green house because the couch is surprisingly green, and lots of the decorations are green too.  It is 4 stories, although the 4th story is mostly the roof, which is pretty cool.  We looked at 8 houses before we decided on the green house.  

I feel like I almost got run over by a motorcycle a million times, except that I never did.  And I say motorcycle because 90% of the traffic is motorcycles, motorbikes or bicycles.  Why do I think I almost got run over by a motorcycle?  Because to Americans, the traffic of Vietnam is complete havoc.  Crosswalks are unappreciated, and it's normal to only barely dodge a pedestrian making his way across the street.

A Glimpse of Life Here

Hi everyone!

We've been in our home a week now and in Da Nang for nearly two, and life is beginning to take on a rhythm.  It's not yet the routine of normal life, but it's closer.  We'll start school for the kids this week (Vietnamese schools have just begun as well), and we are still waiting to hear when Tim's classes will start.

I was looking through our pictures so far and realizing that there are many stories still untold, so in this post I'll give just a few pictures that cover a variety of aspects of our life here, and then we'll add details in the days to come.  You'll start hearing directly from the kids, too, since writing blog entries will be a requirement in their schooling each week!

First up, this is our house.  It's brand new, which is a first for us!  It looks impressively large from this view, but it is not very deep.  The second picture shows the view of the living room/kitchen/dining area from the stairs, and you can see that the room is narrow in one direction and long in the other.  All the houses here are tall and skinny, but since ours is on the corner, we have windows the width of the house instead of at the two skinny ends.  This gives us a lot of light and fresh air, but also exposes us to more heat.  Since it's a new building, we don't have the mature trees that our neighbors have.

We have three stories plus a rooftop patio that is becoming a garden.  I'll let Tim write about that since it's been his passion to get plants and furniture up there.  It's going to be fabulous as soon as it's not too hot to enjoy it!  We have three bedrooms, each with their own bathrooms, and some extra spaces that will become game rooms or such.  Right now we're clinging closely to our air-conditioned bedrooms and haven't finished setting up the other rooms.  Our neighborhood is wonderful. We expected to live surrounded by the noises of city life (and we have some of that), but instead we have a neighbor who plays light jazz on his saxophone after dinner.  It's lovely.

Currently our main activities include going to English Club at the Vision English Cafe, shopping for household goods, and going to the beach.  Tim told you about shopping in the last post, but I found this picture of all of us riding the "rampscalator," as the kids have named it.  If you've been in multi-level grocery stores in major cities you've seen them--they're escalators that are made for shopping carts to be able to go on them without continuing to roll.  The boys think they're the greatest thing ever.

Here's a picture to go with what Tim told you about the Vision English Cafe. This is the second floor room where English Club happens. Anna enjoys being the volunteer leader for one of the groups, but the boys mostly go for the smoothies. And because they have to.  Daniel and Esther have been really kind to us, driving us places in their car, and taking us out for Korean food.

  

And then there's the paradise aspect of living in Da Nang.  For $4 per person we can swim in this pool. After playing in the surf and sand first, then rinsing off in a shower spouting from a palm tree.

The Vietnamese all go to the beach at two times of day only: early in the morning (5:30-7:00), or late in the afternoon (4:30-7:00).  This picture was taken at 9:00am, and we had the place to ourselves.  Only non-Asian tourists are on the beach the whole rest of the day because the locals prefer not to be in the full sun.  It's nice to know when and where we can go to be alone, but after this first visit we've gone during the local times in order to match our daily rhythm to theirs.  Only once did we make it out at sunrise, but it's something I'm going to work at making happen regularly.  It really is a marvelously refreshing way to start the day--everyone is out exercising at that time, either swimming or doing various calisthenics on the beach or participating in a dance class in the park, all with the glorious backdrop of the sun rising over the ocean.  Then, about 6:30, most everyone leaves to get on with their day.  The days that I've gotten myself out first thing in the morning like that (to the beach is best, but even walking the neighborhood helps), I don't feel as hot as when I get up and the weather is already steamy.

         

Our initial stomach upsets and dehydration headaches seem to have subsided, so we are well on our way to enjoying a year of soaking up life, Vietnam-style.

Love,

The Foreign Five (that's Daniel's name for us)

Burning Money

Dear Mom (From Tim)

We've spent 15 Million Dong so far, and that is just what we've gone through at the big-box stores.  

There are 3-4 such stores in town: 

1) Metro is similar in scope to Costco and we've bought our biggest-ticket items there, such as a water dispenser that both heats and cools water from a blue jug, like what you might find in offices in the USA, shelving, fans, towels, blankets.  Our receipt was printed on a dot-matrix printer! Metro has some pretty awesome stuff from all over the international scene--the world has REALLY gotten smaller since we last lived in Asia.

2) Big C is organized like WalMart used to be in small Oklahoma towns 20 years ago.  A little haphazard, with an attempt at being organized and unified.  Music blares and hurts my ears, but still I haven't thought ahead far enough to stick earplugs in my shopping backpack.  Taking backpacks shopping makes sense, but they go to all kinds of measures to make sure I'm not shoplifting.  One store passed a long zip-tie through all of my zipper pockets to make sure I didn't stuff something in. Several stores have free lockers outside that I check my bag into, and most stores take a look at Janet's little purse and ask her to hand it to the gate guard.  Gate guard takes it and puts it into a plastic baggie sized for the purpose, then uses a heated metal sealing machine to seal the baggie closed around the purse.  Note to self--carry your phone in your pocket, not in your purse.

3) Lotte Mart has the best cheap food-court in town, and good prices and selection on many types of food and household goods.  I spent several hundred dollars here on two trips (pillows, small tools, kitchen bowls and silverware and other kitchen startup stuff, laundry soap, hand sanitizer, boxed milk, trash cans, etc.).  When we discovered that the electric tea-pot in the rental house was being supplied with the furnishings, I went back with the unopened tea-pot I'd purchased several days before at Lotte.  There's a Refunds/Exchanges counter there, and I walk up to it, smiling ignorant-foreigner-style, and present my receipt and teapot.  Oh, sorry sir, no exchangee.  Tim points to sign that says (in English and Viet) "bring it back in original condition within 7 days" and continues to smile.  Eventually there are no fewer than 5 Viet women standing around me, talking loudly in complaining tones.  One employee, a recent graduate of the Foreign Languages college, was trying to translate between them and the gangly giant of a foreigner who was trying to return something for no other reason than that he didn't want/need the thing he'd bought.  Keep smiling.  If you get mad, the game is up.  They made their point sufficiently clear--don't buy it unless you intend to keep it.  I got my refund.

4) Vincom is the closest to our house.  Since taxis don't know our street name, I often get in and say "Vincom" to get the wheels rolling while I pull up Google Maps on my phone to show the specific street if I need to.  Vincom opened a month or two ago and is a pretty swanky mall with a Vinmart store in the second level.  Vinmart has most of the food staples we'll need, but earplugs are an absolute must.  I can't tell you how frustrating it is to have to shop with my hands clapped to my head--sometimes I found myself shopping in a part of the store I didn't want to be in, just because it was a bit farther away from the speakers.  Tonight we'll do a taste-test of the 4 brands of ice cream Vinmart sells.  Each brand offers a vanilla and one or two alternate flavors, but the other flavors are not consistent: chocolate, durian, strawberry, green bean, red bean, etc.  We live between other foreign families (noted in teal splotches), and we've invited them over tonight for an ice cream expat open-house.

We've been spending money NOT at big-box stores, too.

• Each of us laid out $95US at the immigration office in Ho Chi Min City for a 3-month visa that we'll extend in September when the paperwork gets sorted out.  
• Each of us paid about $40 for a used bike.  I paid more for a 6-speed because it's tall enough for me and I'll be biking to work at the foreign languages college.  By the way, in a totally unrelated note, it turns out that the word for foreign languages and the word for "women" is almost completely the same word.  But when it comes out of my mouth, the Viet friends laugh and tell me that I just said I teach at the University of Danang Women.  Yeesh.
• We laid out the deposit and the first 5 months of rent for the house, in cash.  Also contributed $300 to match the landlord's $300 for some improvements to the house.  So that was $4000 that I had carried into Viet Nam under my belt that I was GLAD to get rid of.  We thought ahead and specified that at the end of our rental time, he'll give us back USD instead of Viet Dong.
• Yesterday I changed $300 at the bank and by the end of the night I only had one million Dong in my wallet.  Busy day!  I biked from here to the College of Women, stopping at furniture stalls along the way.  This morning, a motorbike pulled up with my metal table and 8 metal chairs strapped to the back.  I'm still waiting for my wooden chairs to come--there are 4 solid chairs with arms and two recliner beach-type loungers for the rooftop garden.  Last night I went up after English Corner at the Vision Cafe and got caught up on some work on the rooftop, but all I had to sit on was a plastic stool.  The wooden outdoor furniture will be a welcome addition.
• We paid a million Dong to a foreigner who was selling their bunkbed.  The three kids continue to share a room, so having a bunkbed is a huge bonus.  A next-step is to build a bed that is 1.5 levels tall--we'll have a veritable jungle-gym of beds in there!
• We usually average about 100,000 VND per taxi ride, and in these first 11 days in Da Nang we've been averaging 4 taxi rides per day.  That's a cool 4 Million, give or take.  But that will become much less now that we have bikes and aren't daily needing to cross town to do major shopping expeditions.
• Activating our phones here really didn't cost that much, even with data plans.  And even though I had to pay the first 6 months of internet service in a lump sum, it only set me back a couple hundred USD.  We haven't yet seen how much it's costing us to keep the three bedrooms air conditioned to 25 degrees.  Incidentally, our bodies are adjusted now to both time and heat.  Today is 33 degrees and the kids are downstairs playing in the non-AC zone of our house rather than confining themselves to the upper bedrooms.  We didn't get to the beach this morning, but yesterday we walked with a Viet neighbor at 5:30am and did calisthenics on the promenade before soaking in the warm seawater.  We rise early, nap during the hot noon hour, and stay up late.  

Speaking of staying up late... I now drink coffee.  With sweetened-condensed milk and ice.  I drink it before English Corner so that I don't get heavy-eyed in the context of 40 eager young Viet students all wanting to practice their English on the foreigners.  The organizer is Thach, a 4th year student at the University campus across the street from the Vision Cafe (the one where I teach that is either a NGOAI or a NOAI campus, depending on if you can even hear the difference when a giggling Viet student is trying to help you distinguish one).  Thach starts us off with an hour of free-talk from 7 to 8, then we play a little English guessing game and have guided discussions from 8-9.  There are two air conditioners in the second-story room, and they give it their best shot, but it's a warm room and it's important for me to be fully caffeinated for these events.

The owner of the Vision Cafe is Daniel. He and Esther came from Korea, where they poured their lives into international students for many years.  Finally they went international themselves, and they've been here in Viet Nam for 10 months. They opened the cafe in the summer break, and they have some hope of turning a profit now that school is starting up again. That's a nice way to have a soft opening and get your systems in place before everything starts up, but it has meant they've been hemorrhaging money for the summer. I'm fingers-crossed for them to turn from red to black, financially. Cross your fingers with me, for them?

Janet and I view the work that Daniel and Esther do as very, very important.  We're likely to reference it throughout this year, as we have made a commitment that we will be volunteering there at the cafe twice a week throughout the school year.  Then on most other nights we'll arrange for parties and private classes with students in our home.  Building relationships, talking about things big and small, eating food, watching movies, sharing life.

By the way, in the course of composing this blog post, my wooden furniture arrived by motortaxi:

Love, 

The Vietnam Chases

First Days

We've gone from feeling totally upside down to just feeling a little sideways, so we should be posting more regularly now.  Jet lag is still a foe, but the battle is not as desperate as it was.

Let me back up and continue the story where I left off.  We were delighted to find that all of our luggage was waiting for us when we finished going through the immigration line.  Oddly enough, ours was the only luggage cheerfully signed by friends and well-wishers. We love seeing all those messages!  Thank you to all of you who came and signed them.

It was about 10:30 am when we left the airport and took a taxi to our hotel.  I'm glad we were so tired, because it's harder to be anxious about getting lost and separated from each other when your brain has been reduced to a quivering jelly.  The boys and I got in one taxi, Tim and Anna in another.  When we don't have a year's worth of luggage with us we fit in one taxi, but for that first ride we split up.  I thoroughly enjoyed the drive.  Being back in Asia is delightful.  The traffic is insanely beautiful.  It just works.  I'm really thankful that we had already arranged a hotel and had no decisions to make.  Since we thought we would be there for two nights, and because we had so much luggage with us, we had rented an apartment rather than a single bedroom.  When we first saw it I thought it was much too large for so short a stay, but it turned out to be a really good thing.  We needed all that extra space to bump around in.  If we had just been in small rooms featuring mostly BEDS! we would have found it tortuous not to be in those beds. Our first priority was to take enough of a shower to be clean enough to swim in the magnificent swimming pool.  We were pretty stinky after our airport stay and sweaty arrival in tropical humidity!

As you know, Tim is quite the networker, so he had already arranged for a woman from New Zealand to meet us and help us spend the day in the city.  She joined us for a swim, and although we weren't the best conversation company that day, we were truly grateful to have someone keep us awake and help us get lunch and sim cards for our phones and such.  We got to experience our first tropical downpour, and the boys had a second "swim," this time in the street.  It definitely helped to cool things down.

After our new friend left we had an all-out war against jetlag.  Anna was bumping into walls, dozing off in strange positions, and occasionally making random and loud comments about cookies.  She gave up the battle at about 6:30.  Tim was whimpering and begging to sleep, so he did allow himself a short snooze.  I was walking around constantly because if I stopped moving, and especially if I sat down, my eyes got impossibly heavy.  Michael and Daniel were actually feeling pretty good because they had been able to sleep the most during the journey.  We took a walk on the hotel grounds at about 7:00, and it was completely dark out.  That's taking some getting used to.  In all my life, if it's dark by 6:30, it's also cold outside.  Having it dark and hot and not be late at night is a strange feeling.  And it makes us so sleepy!  At 7:30 we all gave up the fight and went to bed.  We slept until about 5:30 and considered it a rousing success.  Mission accomplished.

I'm going to skip ahead a few days so I don't get too far behind, and we'll keep filling in the blanks until we're current.

We arrived in Da Nang on Monday.  We were met by our contact on the university staff and spent most of the first day with her.  She took us out for a fabulous dining experience, and we'll tell you about that in more detail later.  For those of you who know Daniel's eating habits, you'll perhaps be as amazed as I was to hear that he ate everything, didn't make yucky faces, and actually liked what he tried.

More stories to come are about the Vision English Cafe across the street from the campus.  We have become regulars already, and we will be attending an English-speaking event there on Friday.   The owners are Korean and their goal has been to provide a place for the students to hang out and practice their English.  Michael has been enjoying fruit smoothies and Korean snacks.  Anna has been thrilled to pieces to be drinking coffee.

We'll also tell about house hunting and meeting new friends and going to the beach.  We're so glad to be here!

Da Nang at last.

We're here.  In Da Nang, in our guest rooms where we will stay until we find an apartment.  Phew.  We made it!

We knew getting here would be an adventure--we've been saying all along that we were making this huge life change because we wanted a family adventure.  Well, the funny thing about adventures is that they require unplanned, unexpected things to happen.  If everything goes according to plan, you might be having a good time, but you aren't having an ADVENTURE.

We had a wonderful final day in the USA, seeing Wicked in Portland, eating at the Spaghetti Factory with good friends (goodbye, American food!) and driving up to Seattle where another good friend met us at the airport to hang out during our late night check-in.  All of this was wonderful, planned, and expected.

Then the adventures began!  We got up to the check-in desk with our mass of luggage and were pleased that all of our bags weighed in at the expected amounts (slightly lighter than the international flight required so that we wouldn't be overweight for the domestic flight in Vietnam.).  Tim had packed and weighed and adjusted and re-weighed (again and again) with precision accuracy.



We had loaded our carry-on bags with everything we anticipated needing for the first two weeks so we wouldn't even need to open those heavy big suitcases until we were settling in to our apartment.  After the airline attendant finished putting baggage claim stickers on all our bags, she asked us to weigh our carry-ons.  What?  Weigh the carry-ons?  This was new.  And not good.  Every one of our our carry-on bags was significantly heavier than the 7 kg allowance.  So, there at the check-in desk at midnight, we pulled things out of our lovely rectangular rolling carry-on bags and stuffed them willy-nilly into each piece of checked luggage that could still take some weight.  Stuffing, weighing, re-stuffing, re-weighing.  I think we spent 45 minutes checking in.  And once we left there and went to the security check, we had the lightest carry-on bags I have ever traveled with in my life!



Nothing else eventful happened for about 12 hours.  Just some tossing and turning and trying to get comfortable enough to sleep on the plane, eating meals at strange hours and watching in-flight movies. Then about an hour before we were supposed to land, our pilot told us we were being re-routed to Hong Kong because of turbulent weather around Taipei.  Typhoon hits Taipei, Taiwan: appreciate the terrific T's...

We landed in Hong Kong about the same time we would have landed in Taipei, and we sat in the plane outside the airport awaiting a change in the weather.  About every hour or so our pilot would make an announcement that the storm was still in progress.  This happened for FIVE HOURS!  Have you ever been on a plane for 17 hours that you thought you'd be on for only 12 hours?  It's pretty exciting.  There's nothing quite like sitting on a plane that isn't even flying.  It's pretty fun to be a flight attendant on a plane that's been sitting on the tarmac for an extra 5 hours, too.  They just kept bringing us snacks and water because they were so glad to have the extra time with us.

Finally it was determined that our flight would be clear to go after another two hours, so we were given meal vouchers and allowed to get off the plane to get our own lunches in the airport.  I'm sorry to say that we, the Chases, lovers of Asian foods, spent our meal vouchers in the Hong Kong airport eating Popeye's Chicken.  You can ask me why if you want the whole story, but just know that we apologize.

When the time came to re-board our plane for the flight to Taipei, it was like coming back to an old friend.  The flight attendants felt that way, too.  Landing in Taipei was quite an accomplishment, and the still-turbulent weather above made for some stomach-tickling turbulence that the kids found delightful.  We got off the plane with a feeling of triumph and were greeted by about 30 EVA Air employees smiling and handing us each a gift bag with a tin of biscuits in it.  It's amazing how a tin of biscuits can erase all the inconveniences of a long-delayed flight.  It was now about 4:00 in the afternoon, and we were told that our flight to Saigon would leave at 10:00 pm.  We were given meal vouchers again and set off to explore another Asian airport.



We were pretty dazed and groggy by this point, so it took a long time to figure out what was strange about this airport (aside from the creatively-themed waiting rooms and abundance of artificial plants attached to walls and ceilings everywhere).  Normally, if you are someone with a really long lay-over, you find a place to hang out and watch the ebb and flow of people coming through the airport.  A flight arrives and hundreds of people walk by.  A flight leaves and a gate empties out.  The hall is crowded, the hall is empty.  People are coming and going.  But when an airport was closed for half a day because of a typhoon, thousands and thousands of people are in limbo in that airport.  Long-overdue flights were finally coming in, but not enough flights were yet able to leave.  Multiple flights were directed to the same gate to wait, and no one could really say which flight was going to leave first.  Every restaurant had a crazy-long line, and most people standing there were holding airline-supplied meal vouchers.  In fact, many of the restaurants were running out of food.  I must apologize again, because the Chase family spent the bulk of our food voucher coupons at Starbucks.  But we did get a banana-guava juice and a watermelon-milk-drink at a kiosk first.

I'll spare you all the groggy details, but our flight didn't leave at 10:00.  There were gate changes.  There were two flights to LA that left first, both from our gate.  There were irate passengers, loudly yelling at the 20-year-old female gate clerk, who clearly bore the fault of the typhoon and all its airport-chaos aftermath. There were uncomfortable chairs and fluorescent lights.  But what I really want to tell you is that we have the most amazing children in the whole world.  This travel "day" I'm describing probably sounds like a nightmare, but we felt really pretty good the whole time.  The kids were calm and collected.  They didn't fight.  They didn't complain.  They just rolled with it.  Gold stars for everyone!

At 5:45 am, 24 hours after we had landed in Hong Kong, we left the Taipei airport, on a plane bound for Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).  The ending of the journey was really pretty anti-climactic.  Nothing interesting happened on that final flight.  Nothing interesting happened when we got our visas or went through customs.  I tell ya, if there's ever a part of your journey you hope is really boring, it's the going through customs part!

I'll have the kids write their first impressions of Asia and give you a more poetic telling of our arrival, but for now I'm just trying to get the sequence out because it's how the story begins.  We can tell you about the lovely pool at our hotel and our duke-it-out fight with jetlag.  We can tell you about our first-ever business-class flight from Saigon to Da Nang on Monday, and what it felt like to be in our city for the first day.  Tuesday we'll go looking at houses with our realtor, and we'll make sure to add more pics next post.

Love,
The Chases

Do you know what that stamp means?  It means we are now legal to enter the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam.

I'm going to tell you (almost) the whole story.  It's a good one. And a long one. 

It goes like this: 

More than a year ago, as we were thinking of which country to take our family to in SE Asia or the Middle East, we suddenly put Vietnam back on the table.  Clinched the deal when my dad said "If you guys go live in Vietnam, mom and I will come with you."  The idea of having 3 generations of Chases living abroad together is too delicious to pass up, so I looked at Dave's ESL Cafe job-board to see what opportunities might be available in Da Nang (the city my mom and dad most preferred, and by all reports a great place to live if you can come by a teaching job).

There was a single posting for a Fisher's Superkids English Learning Center that was looking for an expat teacher and offering to help with Work Permit and Visa.  I wrote to the owner, Hai, but since I wasn't actually applying at that time (it was still 16 months away from our go-time), my email went unanswered.  Undaunted, I then spent several hours surfing the college websites for colleges/universities up and down the coast around Da Nang.  I collected all the email addresses I could find and sent out 24 emails introducing myself briefly and asking to be put into contact with the Foreign Languages Department or any foreign teachers associated with the campus.

No response.

A little daunted, I started searching Facebook for any people or groups with Da Nang as part of their search terms.  Success!!  There is a closed FB group for expats living in Da Nang, and they let me join even though I wasn't actually there yet.  So grateful.  I've been lurking on that group for a year, and learning lots about the community we're moving into.

However, the FB group was not optimistic about English teachers finding a job that would provide a Visa and Work Permit.  The overwhelming sentiment in the group is that everyone needs three years of English-Teaching experience (got it!) and a TEFL certificate.  Don't got it.  My bachelor's degree is in English Education, but a Teaching English as a Foreign Language certificate I don't have, and I was just hoping my experience would carry the day.  The other overwhelming sentiment among the Facebook expats is that most of the language centers are pretty much fly-by-night situations that don't offer a Work Permit.  Without a Work Permit, you are just a 3-month TOURIST, and you'll need to pay thousands of dollars in Tourist Visas (for a family of 5) and leave the country on a visa run every three months.

Re-enter Hai, the owner of Fisher's Superkids from a couple paragraphs back.  HE was offering work permits...

But I'm not going to make the mistake of writing directly to him again!  Instead, I stalked him on Facebook, figuring to create my own ad-hoc "Linked In" network of Da Nang folks and meet Hai via an introduction from a mutual friend.  In December, I was FB chatting with a friend and said "Do you know Hai?  Can I get an introduction?"  But nothing came of that for some reason, and I didn't push for it.  Sometimes when the doors of life are closed, we push them open.  Sometimes a different wisdom comes into play, and we wait in the corridor.  This was one of the latter.

In late February, an expat from Da Nang was home in the USA, so I gave him a call to ask some questions that I hadn't wanted to ask on the internet.  I figure everything I write in email, Facebook, etc. is subject to scrutiny by the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam, and I wanted to ask some things off the record, as it were.

In the call, I asked him if he knew Hai and if he'd introduce me.  He did, and then did.  Hai wrote back and said that he was sorry but he was terribly busy and couldn't Skype for another 3 weeks.  That put us past the midway point of March.  Then when our appointment was coming up, Hai wrote and delayed another several days.  Patience is a fruit the Holy Spirit is growing in me, and I wait.

We talk on Wednesday.  It's a good talk, and we like each other.  But his program isn't right for me (little kids age 4-8) and I'm not right for it, and the call is tapering off.  Then he pauses, struck by an idea.

"Hang on, Tim.  You said you have other income, and so salary isn't a prime consideration, right?  And that you have a master's degree?"  I agreed that both of these points are true.  "Well, would you be at all interested in teaching at the university here?"  Um, yes!  Yes, very much so...  "Because last Friday the university got in contact with me, wanting to subcontract out one or more of my expat teachers.  I wrote up a proposal for them and sent it over for their review on Monday.  But then yesterday they got back to me and said that the money I need to pay my teachers' salaries is too high, but that I should keep my ears open ... Would you like me to introduce you?"

Would I?  Um, yes!

So instead of cold-calling at the university (as I had tried to do 12 months before), I received a warm recommendation and an introduction.  Super awesome.  Handed to me on a platter.  And had I talked to Hai any earlier ...

For the past months, then, since late March, we've known that it's Da Nang and we've known that I'd have a job teaching at the university.  Getting the appropriate paperwork has been a challenge--the Vietnamese government wants certifications and authentications that I never even knew existed.  Got all the paperwork in at the start of July, though, and we've been waiting for the Visa.  

And waiting.

And no visa.

And I'm not impatient, and I sure know not to go pushing on doors in Asian culture.

And no visa, and now it's just a couple of weeks before our flight is leaving, and I start looking into other options, such as a tourist visa, etc.  Waiting.  Casually checking in with the university ....

And it's 3 days till our plane leaves the ground, and they reassure me that the Department of Immigration has our paperwork.  [Does that reassure you, that a government department has your paperwork?  I find that it's not as reassuring as one might have thought...]

And our plane leaves on the 6th and it's the 5th and there's no visa.  Steady on, patience is building.  Stiff upper lip, lads!

And then, this morning at 1:34am (I was sleeping, but emails tell the time), the visa came.  That's one nice thing about working with a country that's 14 hours ahead of your time zone:  they can be working while you're sleeping, and they can be doing something on the day after you really need it, and you can still get it on time!

Now we're sitting in the airport at 1:34am the NEXT morning, about to board our flight.  We are setting ourselves up for adventure, but we're glad that the adventure of securing our work visas is now over!

Farewell Bend

Yesterday two of my kids asked me "Dad, what if nobody comes to our going away party?"

It's happened before, that we put ourselves out there and hoped for lots of friends at an event ... and ended up eating our own party food. I don't know if you've seen the newish cartoon movie, Home, but as I'm writing I think of the pain that "Oh" had when he invited everyone to his housewarming party. We recently saw that, and I wonder if my kids could identify with that character in their anxiety?

But friends came!  And our hearts are full.  And we've farewelled many good people at Farewell Bend Park, and now we're down to not many hours of final packing and details.

This post has a picture of the Chases with all but two of our luggages.  But we think if we keep putting ourselves in each picture we take along this journey, that will get boring.  "And here is Tim in front of the school building where he teaches..."

So we're going to be changing it up.  We have created the first draft of a family of stick-figurines for the purpose of tracking our journey in Vietnam.  Maybe they'll be replaced by bamboo figures when we're there, but for now:

And at the park, we had everyone take pictures with the stick-figure Chases.  In a convoluted way it's a little like taking a picture of a selfie-stick, don't you think?  :)

Good pics of the going-away party: FAREWELL BEND PHOTOS

And now we pray that the visa paperwork gets here on time.  I have to print out the Visa Invitation Letters from an email (that the university hasn't sent yet) and bring them with us to the airport, or we don't fly.  Or maybe they'll forget to check in Seattle, and we'll get to Saigon and be a family trapped in the airport like Tom Hanks in The Terminal.  But mostly I just need the email and a printer.  The university apologizes for the delay and says that they'll be sure to get the paperwork to us on the day we go to the airport to board our flight.  Yeesh.

Going to Vietnam!

We're going to Vietnam!
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