Tuesday morning, early.
Tuesday Afternoon:
Wednesday Morning (Day Zero):
and now we've been home in Bend for 24 hours.
Glad to be home. Already a little homesick for Vietnam.
Falling Refrigerators
Dear Mom,
I know you're not a fan of heights, but yesterday I was invited up to the top floor of a friend's apartment complex where they have an infinity pool. The heat is growing more intense here, every day a little hotter, and that doesn't convey well in the video.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/des7NYiuP8BJLxj68
You begin looking north (pause the video to see details) and you can see where Danang is reclaiming part of the bay to use for building. Actually that reclamation project has been going on for a century and I'm really impressed by how they are shaping the coastline here. The port is across the water at the northwest tip of Son Tra. Then the camera pans over to another water reclamation project and the north-north bridge.
And Dad, you taught me to drive "defensively," always looking for what might happen and being ready to stop or avoid someone else's mistake. And as I was driving recently I realized I was calculating "how far back should I stay from the motorbike ahead of me, in case that refrigerator she's carrying comes unstrapped and falls off?"
Is that a funny sentence to think? Do they not teach that in driver's ed?
Granted, the fridge isn't a full size one, but it's not a mini, either. I stayed well back but then I closed the gap and had the guy I was with snap a photo to send to you.
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Love,
Tim/Janet
PS.
Whenever we have visitors, we like to try to go see the Dragon Bridge spout its fire. This was last Friday:
And a 5-second video: https://photos.app.goo.gl/U6iUr4EidJeqdCMJ9
Lost in Translation
Dear Mom,
And sometimes you can use the camera feature of Google Translate to good effect:
The translation software is always improving, and that's a good thing, too, because it still has had a long way to go! We've seen some *pretty* funny translation attempts as Facebook tries to automatically translate for us our friends' "check in" posts, which are often written in slang kidspeak to begin with. At the moment I don't have any examples of the funny translations, and who am I to complain, anyhow?
Google Translate is a lifesaver, for sure.
becomes
But there are nuances to how I use technology to help with understanding. Sometimes I could generate a translation, but it's actually a picture that I want. An example of this would be when I want popcorn kernels--a very unusual request and only sold in certain shops catering to a tiny sliver of the population. If I type in "popcorn kernel" into Google Translate, it will probably generate a correct word, but that word may not even make sense to most shopkeepers. And then I wouldn't know, when I show them my phone and they shake their head, whether my inquiry actually made sense and they don't have the item, or if the question was itself a dud.
So in that case I'd use my phone as a communication aid in a different way. A Google search generates not only a photo of the item I am searching for, but also the Vietnamese words that are effective to communicate about it.
Recently I was at the tomb of the first emperor of the most modern Vietnamese royal dynasty. That's in Huế, two hours north, where the kingdom capital was located. The tour guide said that people would stand outside the gate of the tomb to "worship" the dead emperor, and it struck me that I really don't know all the finesse of that word as it's used and translated.
So in the cases of real complexity, like this one, I'll ask one of my synthetic friends. The first three paragraphs are my query, and below that is the first paragraph of several pages' worth of answer.
So in the cases of real complexity, like this one, I'll ask one of my synthetic friends. The first three paragraphs are my query, and below that is the first paragraph of several pages' worth of answer.
I don't know how long this link will be valid, but here's the rest of that conversation if you're interested:
If I'm using my phone for translation, I try to use the very simplest English phrases to eliminate accidents. Pronouns and time-phrases are two areas where you need to keep it as simple as possible, and of course keep away from idioms.
Ironically, sometimes the best way to simplify your language for translation is to use a more sophisticated word. In the last paragraph I said "keep away from idioms" which sounds to us like a simpler way of saying the two words "avoid idioms." But actually in this case your translation app will thank you for using the specific word that has only one meaning. There are so many examples of this, where we usually use language that's a little slippery and friendly, and instead it's helpful for the translation software if we can use crisp, precise language.
Phrasal verbs such as “figure out” “work out” “pick up” “get over” “take off” look simple but are ambiguous for translation software.
Example: “I’ll pick it up later.” ---- could mean: collect something, learn something quickly, improve (skills), lift something
Words like: “retrieve,” “collect,” or “acquire” are easier to translate because they're more precise.
Yep. This stuff is interesting to me, but I can see that it might not seem like there's much of a point. I guess it's just what I've been thinking about in regards to using my phone more effectively as a translation tool. Much love!
~Tim/Janet
PS.
A group of friends from Bend is here, and it's delightful for us to show them our city. Tonight we're taking some of them to vegetarian dinner before Vision English Club. Tomorrow we're planning to rent a motorbike so we can all be on two wheels (when the occasions arise for us to safely convoy like that).
Staying in my Shadow
Dear Mom,
These days we are looking forward to (and planning ahead for) a visit from the States. This one is a group of 6, coming from Bend, and they'll be here for two weeks at the end of March.
We're looking forward to hosting them! We're planning to introduce them to our local friends, eat local food together, and show them a glimpse of what Life-in-Vietnam looks like. It's going to be fabulous! I'm sure we'll be blogging about it.
(Other Moms: Want to come? You're out of time to plan a visiting-the-Chases trip this time, because two months from today we'll be home and attending our boys' graduation from George Fox University. However, we hope this isn't our last time in Vietnam, and we'd love to arrange a visit from YOU. Let's plan together!)
Today we're meeting a friend from the old days. She is nervous about having her first baby, later this month, and Aunt Janet is full of helpful advice, website links, and books. This is a country where no books like What to Expect When You're Expecting have been circulating, and it's kinda crazy how much Janet says about being a Mom is coming as news to her. Also we're fingers-crossed for her inner peace and health. And their marriage is a topic of our finger-crossing, too. Lots of good things are possible!
As we were driving to meet her, I realized something about traffic flow. The guests who are coming this month will probably want to rent a motorbike, so I'm thinking about that. I passed a small bus on its right as we drove through through a chaotic intersection, and though I was entirely safe and at-ease, I realized it would feel like a terribly risky thing to a motorbike newbie. At least it would feel risky to a Vietnam-motorbiking newbie!
The safest place for you, when we're crossing an intersection together, is immediately beside me and slightly back. Your front wheel is right next to my rear wheel (if we're flying in Top Gun, you're flying in Wingman position). You may expect me to slow down or even stop as we approach the intersection, but instead we're moving forward because we have the flow and rhythm and it's the right moment. So stay in my "Traffic Shadow" and keep your tire adjacent to mine. By "traffic shadow" I mean that if the traffic is coming from our left, I hope you're on my right, in wingman, and down-stream from me with my motorbike blocking anything coming your way.
When I think of the traffic shadow, and how my bike is casting a shadow of safety for your adjacent bike, I often think of references in the Good Book where the Lord is described as casting a shadow of safety. Here's one: https://www.biblehub.com/psalms/36-7.htm
I'm grateful. I'm grateful to be in His shadow. I'm grateful to live in this place. I'm grateful to be able to host the group that's coming. I'm grateful to be coming home to Bend. I'm grateful to be forming plans to return here to live again, in a rhythm. I'm grateful for the many relationships we have formed in Vietnam and in the USA. I'm grateful for the increasing sense of connections that are forming between these two countries we love.
What are you grateful for? What are you looking forward to? Each time we exchange an email or chat in Signal/WhatsApp, those count as valuable threads linking your house and mine.
Love,
Tim/Janet
PS.
Cooking and Eating together is a favorite pastime for us here.
Learning some basic Vietnamese home-cooking with Thủy:
And making pizza (first time --so exciting-- for all the local friends) with Vision English Club.
May God-our-Father release blessing for you in this new year-of-the-horse. May he go before you and watch behind you, bringing you close to his heart. May your eyes be brightened and enlightened, that you can appreciate Joy like never before, even in places you didn't expect to find it.
Chúc mừng năm mới! We love you!
~Tim and Janet
Today is the day after Tet Holiday, or the second day of Tết. (By the way, I’ve begun to learn to type with Vietnamese diacritical markers, so if I toggle to my Vietnamese keyboard—Win+Spacebar—I can type “T e t e s” and it puts the hat on the e and adds an upward stroke. And I feel very cool about it.)
In this email I just want to unpack the screenshot above a bit.
This is a message sent to the woman who worked for the professional service they hired to clean the house we’re living in prior to our move-in. She’s named Nhung, and she agreed to come once or twice a month to help the house get a periodic deep clean—we’re so grateful!
The message is sent in an app called Zalo. It’s created by the Vietnamese government, for the use of the Vietnamese people, and if you’re a privacy advocate you can read into that statement anything you want to. It’s an easy guess that if the “winds” ever shift here, like they have in China, all the other messaging platforms could lose access and the people would need to use Zalo to communicate. In China the 微信 app is also the one they use for banking and paying each other, so it makes for lots of … transparency. We enjoy using Zalo with local friends and consider all of our comms, regardless of encryption, fully transparent.
I sent the blessing message to her on the evening of the first day of the Lunar New Year. February 17 is the basically the latest date for Tet that we’ll ever see.
Next 9 Years (2026–2035)
2026: February 17 — Year of the Horse (Ngọ)
2027: February 6 — Year of the Goat (Mùi)
2028: January 26 — Year of the Monkey (Thân)
2029: February 13 — Year of the Rooster (Dậu)
2030: February 3 — Year of the Dog (Tuất)
2031: January 23 — Year of the Pig (Hợi)
2032: February 11 — Year of the Rat (Tý)
2033: January 31 — Year of the Buffalo (Sửu)
2034: February 19 — Year of the Tiger (Dần)
Nhung gave a heart to my message and replied with a blessing of her own. She’s home with teenage sons and extended family this week, and we’ll see her again next week.
When we saw her for the last time before Tết holiday, we handed her an envelope with “lucky money” inside. I have more to learn about lucky money, but what I know so far is that any time someone enters my home for the next two days, I should have a red envelope with clean/crisp money inside. The luck that I’m extending isn’t based on the amount of value, and the luck is luck for them as well as for me. But if you’re a kid in 2026 you definitely track which of your uncles gives a better payout when your family visits their house.
I have a friend here in Đà Nẵng, an American war vet, who gives out Lucky Money envelopes all year long. I try to get coffee with him (and/or a bowl of phở) every week, so I see him giving red envelopes A LOT. Someone selling hair bands or cigarette lighters or lotto tickets will walk through the cafe we’re in, and he gestures them over and hands them an envelope with cash inside, and wishes them a simple blessing from God. He gets his red envelopes printed with a tièng Việt Bible verse on them, and he buys them 5000 at a time. It could be wrong, and I know about lots of the inherent dangers of coupling spiritual things with financial charity, but I’ve been with this guy enough and seen the interactions enough to validate that what he’s doing is deeply right on so many levels.
Tết Bánh chưng
Dear Mom,
For the past week we've been seeing wood-fired simmering pots in unused lots and on sidewalks, and today we finally got an inside peek at what's been cooking. It's a holiday food called bánh chưng, and people love the nostalgia of making it together. It's an all-day, all-night affair. The rice is soaked in water all night, then the ingredients are packed into banana leaves and tied tightly. They boil in water over an open fire which has to be tended for 10-12 hours! This results in a sticky-rice-pork packet that doesn't need to be refrigerated for up to 10 days. You can see how this would have developed in times pre-dating stovetops and refrigerators, when markets closed for two weeks and everyone rested from work and ate bánh chưng and hung out with family and friends. Young people have mixed feelings about actually eating it now, but they still speak with excitement about the tradition of making it.
We didn't stay for the long cooking process of the ones we helped to pack, but other friends brought us some they had purchased from a famous place, and we shared it tonight with a Vietnamese friend who wasn't with her family. It was actually pretty tasty!
Enjoy the photo journal below from our day making it with friends.
These are the "small" banana leaves.
She's teaching the process of folding the leaves.
Fold and cut to make a leafy box.
Rice and mung beans and pork.
The rice is carefully packed so it's on the outside of the other fillings: bottom, sides, and top. Then the package is folded up.
On another corner, same day:
Conflict Resolution
Dear Mom,
I'm hosting tonight and next Friday night at Vision English Club. I get to choose the discussion topics, and I've got "Conflict Resolution" in the hopper for both Fridays.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/VisionEnglishclub/
Tonight at 7:15 I'll help language learners, usually about 16-20 people, know to introduce themselves and get a feel for who's at their tables. If the tables aren't balanced, I'll do a little shuffling to make sure there isn't any table that just has 4 beginner-speakers and nobody with good speaking ability.
Not every advanced English speaker has been invited to join a group called "Vision Volunteers" but about 10 of them are recognized for their faithfulness to the English Club and their ability to use English to help their peers get practice speaking English. In the photo above we got six local Volunteers and two from Holland together for a game night. It was fun, but more than that it helped the group create a friendship bond. We're looking for ways to enlarge the group and deepen the trust/friendship they feel toward each other.
Then at 7:30 tonight I'll introduce the topic and help each table create a vocabulary list for themselves. "If I knew that the conversation topic tonight were going to be on Conflicts and Conflict Resolution, what vocabulary words would I want to have access to?" I'll give them a chance to brainstorm first, then I'll hand out a crib sheet of vocab that AI helped me generate on the topic.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6985450d-a2f0-800b-9691-ae0bd038efc9
I'll probably also give AI a chance to create an English/Vietnamese lexicon for the topic, but I haven't done that yet.
Oh, that's too funny. I just now went to the Facebook page for Vision Cafe and expanded the post about tonight. Please read it, and as you do keep in mind that I only told them I was going to open up and explore the topic of Conflict Resolution. No spilling tea or "throwing hands." Wow.
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GtQzA9TQH/
But it's a good topic. They'll talk in table groups of 4-5 with various discussion prompts, then toward the end we'll have several people stand and share out to the whole group.
I find myself looking forward to tonight!
Love,
Tim/Janet
How did the tourist cross the road?
Dear Mom,
When visitors come to Vietnam there's really only one scary time, and it's REALLY scary: it's the first time we cross the road.
The newbies often trail cautiously behind, creating an effect like a line of ducklings, with me at the lead like Mama Duck. It's the worst possible line to present to the oncoming traffic. Ducklings NO!
And then when we get them midway across the traffic, they look to their right (correct) and see a gap of traffic (okay) and then make a break for it, bolting across to the other side (NO! This is so scary for Mama Duck!).
We're going to keep moving, slowly and consistently. We're going to present a narrow target to the oncoming traffic. I'll be upstream, uptraffic, and all the newbies can be downstream, safe in my "traffic shadow." It might be that we combine with another group because there is power in numbers (a driver is more cautious about a group than about a solo crosser).
White lines don't have meaning. You can cross anywhere, and traffic behaves the same whether there are lines or not.
My nephew visited recently and then posted about traffic and crossing traffic and did a terrific job of it @ https://saintwerewolf.com/vietnam/#walking, including this gif that caught my attention. Funny because it's so true.
Love,
Tim/Janet
Markets
Dear Mom,
I lost my riding-at-night glasses and would like another pair from Harbor Freight. If you're living in Bend and can help me get those and something from Walmart THIS WEEKEND, I'd be grateful. The next people coming to Vietnam from Bend are leaving on Monday, so I don't have time to order what I need online and have it arrive to them on time. Email me if you're up for a small shopping trip on my behalf.
The Christmas season officially ends for us today, with three more family members (one son and two nephews) flying homeward.
In this picture I'm drinking a soursop shake and my dad and my son are sampling durian smoothies at the biggest municipal market. Durian is ... durian a whole topic unto itself, but I realize I've never talked about markets.
The most common market is a tạp hóa ("top hwaah" with a sharply rising tone as you finish hóa)
These tạp hóa storefronts are generally in someone's house, taking up what we would consider the front living room. The hanging packets across the top are single-use soaps and shampoos. You can also buy TP, snacks, water, drinks, some cooking essentials like oil or fish sauce. If it starts to rain and you're unprepared, you can buy a single-use poncho made of the thinnest plastic you can imagine.
No negotiating prices. Sometimes items are marked, usually not. Sometimes I'm charged a "foreigner tax" and get to pay a higher price, but I don't get mad. There's no point in trying to tell them that I just saw someone else get the same thing for 10K cheaper, or that it's got a standard price and they're gouging. Just note which stalls seem trustworthy and use them in preference to the others.
Next up are the Mini-Marts:
These are chain brands, convenience stores with things you'd expect in an Asian Circle K, plus maybe vegetables/fruit. I'll find one of these for every 5 of the tạp hóa corner stores.
And while there are some huge stores like Mega (a Thai company similar in some ways to a Costco) or Lotte (a Korean chain similar to Super-Target), the only other category of market is a Municipal Market. They range in size, but you're going to find a similar array of things that happen in and around a local "Chợ" Market. IMAGES
At the Municipal Chợ, you'll be able to buy MOST of what a person needs for daily life:
- veggies
- meat/fish
- ice
- fruit
- flowers
- bamboo plants
- clothing
- seamstress
- ancestor-honoring stuff
- food stalls with metal benches (that's where we are in the picture above, holding our durian-fruit shakes)
- dried fruits/nuts
- candles
- scissors
- plastic containers
- umbrellas
- all the stuff available at a tạp hóa
And then around each Chợ (pronounced "chuh-uh" with a rising tone) you're going to find the same sort of shops within a half-block:
- motorbike helmets
- gold shops (this is where you should exchange USD)
- optical shops
- food stalls that shift from breakfast to morning snack, then disappear for 2-3 hours, then reappear to sell early-dinner snack
- and obviously some coffee shops and motorbike repair shops, but that's a given since they're so ubiquitous
It takes some time to get the hang of knowing where to go when I need a certain item, and then once I've gone somewhere and had a positive experience, I always go back to the same person when I need something similar. I'm good at making eye contact with the sellers and smiling, so that when I return I usually get a happy greeting.
Ah, when I wrote that last sentence I could hear someone reading and thinking "yeah, they're happy because they know they can cheat him again," but that's actually not true. The ones who cheat me are universally unhappy to see me again. I'm never harsh with them, and I try to avoid going back to them so this seldom happens, but they never gesture to me to buy something when I go past. It's so different with the ones who give me the local prices from the start--they're happy to have me as a returning, eye-contact-smiling customer.
Which brings up one more point about the markets, and haggling. There's really only one sort of place we haggle here, and it's the places that sell things to tourists. Haggling/negotiating for prices is not done at a tạp hóa or most chợs (except for the one Chợ Han in town that is dedicated to tourist traffic).
I'd sign off by saying "okay, that's all, I'm off to the Chợ/Market now" but it's 1pm and nothing is open. All the Chợ stalls are asleep and the tạp hóa lady would wonder why I'm waking her up to buy a wheel of peanuts. The only places to go shopping at 1pm around here are the minimarts, which usually don’t carry what I’m needing, or one of the big stores across town, and I'm too sleepy to want to make the journey.
Love,
Tim/Janet
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