Monkey V Robot

I don't know if this story has hit the mainstream English-language media yet. I saw this story on a Vietnamese website for teens (someone pointed it out to me because I don't usually read this site). The article with photos is here: http://kenh14.vn/c44/t11/2009091901222978/con-quai-vat-nhay-nhua-lam-nhom-ban-teen-kinh-hon-tang-dom.chn

For those of you who don't speak Vietnamese (which is probably just about everyone reading this), here's a basic translation of the article:
A slimy "monster" makes group of teens scared out of their wits

Most recently, an extraordinary creature with an image like Gollum (the half-person/half-beast monster in the "Lord of the Rings" films) appeared unexpectedly in Chile. And it was killed on the spot.

[Links to other "monster creature" news stories like some big eels washing up on beaches]

The pathetic creature had a totally bizarre outer appearance. It was slimy, with no hair on its body and a bald head, with a "face" that looked very much like a human face. The "Real Live Gollum" monster crept up from Lake Panama (near the Cerro Azul region, Chile), climbed up the surrounding stones and moved closer to a group of young friends.

[Still photo from Lord of the Rings movie]
Gollum in the movie

At that time, those teens were playing around on the river bank in the lake area. Unexpectedly, the monster emerged from a cave behind a waterfall. The crowd of friends screamed loudly because the creature kept dragging its feet and advancing on them like it was "preparing to attack". In a bout of fear, the friends threw rocks at the "creature" to protect themselves. After they killed the monster, they grabbed it and threw it down to the lake then ran off.

[Picture of the creature's face]
"Gollum" monster killed by teens terrified of it.

After that, the parents of those friends came to investigate and they were incredibly surprised when they saw the body of the "Gollum" curled up in the waves on the shore.

Local people described this creature as being almost like the monster Gollum in the "Lord of the Rings" movies. One friend in those witnesses tells: "Only one time I saw a creature anything close to that--that was in the film of Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings'."

[Pictures of the creature's body]
Corpse of the monster washed up on the shore.

Mr. Melquiades Ramos, a specialist working at the National Environmental Office, said he will investigate this "creature". And biologist Jacobo Arauz said that it could be a genetically mutated creature. He guesses that it could be a species belonging to the sloth genus.

[Picture of a sloth]
Is it true that the monster is a form of sloth?

Tonight on my way home, I passed a motorbike being driven by a man with his wife on the back. She was holding a stainless steel double-basin sink in the air over their heads. A kitchen sink. I have now officially seen everything being transported by motorbike.

I went to the hospital near my house a couple days ago to get a health check. The school that I'm working for wants to have a health certificate that says I'm qualified to work in Vietnam before they give me another contract. I've done these tests twice before at another hospital so I wasn't too worried about passing. It's pretty easy.

One of my Vietnamese friends, one of my former teaching assistants named Han (pronounced like it's short for "honey"), met me at the hospital on Friday morning to make sure I found my way to all the right rooms for all the tests. She told me that this hospital is very professional so we shouldn't have to wait too long. The health check procedure for foreigners is pretty much a joke and the doctors at this hospital seem to be aware of it so they went through the motions much more quickly than the previous times I did this.

The ear exam consisted of sitting on a stool in front of a doctor who asked if I spoke Vietnamese. I answered that I could speak a little bit. She asked if I had any problems with my ears. I said no. She shined a light in the general direction of my ear canals and marked "10/10" on my paperwork. The eye exam was pretty much the same. "Look at the chart. Can you read the row of letters next to the red arrow?" "Yes." "All of them?" "Yes." "Good." My vision is 10/10. In previous health exams, there was a "nervous examination" where they poked and prodded me, looked at my hands to see how steady they were, and asked me to squeeze their hands to check if my grip was firm. This time the doctor just asked "How are you? How about your hands? Everything normal? Good." There's a chest X-ray to check for TB, but I didn't even have to take my shirt off for this one (but they did ask me to take the pen and iPod earphones out of the pocket). I hope there are no shirt buttons on my x-ray. I spent more time waiting for tests than taking them. The heart and pulse exam took less time than it did for me to unbutton my shirt so the doctor to stick the stethoscope on my chest. I was at the hospital for about two and a half hours but the tests took about 15 minutes total.

They spelled my name horribly wrong on the paperwork. They split my middle name into two words and made a typo for my first name. They didn't even put my last name on it. The test results will all have the name "Briaw Chris Topher" on them. When we noticed and asked them to fix it, they just said that I could sign any name I want when I pick up the results. Next time I have to do one of these "health checks", I'm just going to ask if I can write all the "10/10" scores myself and get the results right away instead of wasting time sitting in the hospital or wandering from one exam room to another.

I just finished reading "Murder on the Orient Express". It was very interesting. I normally don't like mysteries much but this one really drew me in. I can see why it's so famous but I had the same problems with it that I have with so many other mysteries: the detective is made to seem brilliant by keeping details hidden from the audience but not from him.

I think part of the appeal of reading a mystery is in trying to solve the mystery. I hate it when the detective is made to look smart by giving him information that the audience isn't told. For just one example, when one character in the book is covering for another, she describes a fictional person that she names Mrs. Freebody. Hercule Poirot reveals later that he knew she was actually thinking of Miss Debenham and describing someone quite the opposite in appearance to cover for her. How did he know? Because there's a shop in London called Debenham & Freebody and she said the first name to come to mind when pressed. The audience could have figured that out too if we had been told that was a popular shop. I prefer a mystery where the audience is privy to the same information as the detective so I can try to piece it together myself.

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I love this commercial. It cracks me up every time I see it on t.v. I think it's funny that the guy doesn't just drink the energy drink and fly into a flurry of XTREME action: he does some warm-up exercises first. The tag line at the end is "Add energy in order to fight". (That's "fight" in the sense of "struggling to win" like the way you fight a battle, not "hitting each other" the way you fight a person.)

http://clip.vn/watch/Quang-Cao-Nuoc-Tang-Luc-Samurai,W4QL

There is a small group of little Khmer kids that beg at a highway intersection that I pass on my way to work. As is often the case, they carry babies with them. The other day I noticed one girl around 8 years old wandering through the crowd of bikes stopped at the light. She was waving her plastic begging bowl around with one hand. The other hand was helping to support a little baby tied to her body with a kroma knotted and looped like a sling. The baby was too small to be able to walk yet but it was holding a plastic bag with a straw sticking out of it and closed with a rubber band. This is a very common and cheap method of getting drinks "to go" in Vietnam. What was the baby drinking? Not milk, which would come in a pasteurized tetrapak box. Not even cheap, 5 cents a pint soy milk being sold nearby. It was coffee. Black coffee.

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My fingertips are getting tougher. They don't hurt anymore but they do feel unusually warm after playing guitar. I learned three more chords today, which doubles my chord knowledge to six. I can now play three major chords (G, C, and D) and three minor chords (Em, Am, and Dm). When I strummed E minor for the first time, I thought "Holy shit! Pink Floyd!" I guess David Gilmour and Roger Waters used that chord a lot because it really reminds me of Pink Floyd. My progress seems to be much faster than I expected it to be. Maybe I have a talent for this and never knew it before now.

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Yesterday, my fingertips hurt a bit. Today, they just feel a little numb like I'm wearing rubber gloves but the numbness is only on the very tips of my fingers. It's not debilitating but I can't imagine performing surgery in this condition. I wonder how Buckaroo Banzai does it.

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I bought an electric guitar and amp on Friday. I got it from a small shop packed with guitars and stacks of guitar parts. It's a knockoff of a Fender but I bought it from the man who made it. I've practiced for a while on Friday and Saturday night. I can tune the guitar, play the chromatic scale, and I know three chords (G, C, and D if you're keeping score). My fingertips are sore and I'm still very slow at changing from one note or chord to the next, but I'm pretty impressed with my progress after only a couple of days. I need to get some headphones for the amp so I can practice without disturbing the neighbors (and advertising my beginner status).

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I went to Singapore in December and bought a 32 gig iPod touch while I was there. Now that I can post to my LJ from almost anywhere, I'm going to start updating more often.

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If you have some questions, feel free to post them here.

We went to Ha Noi for Tet again this year. It was very cold. It was only 50F, which doesn't sound too cold, but there is no relief from it. In America right now, there is a lot of snow and cold weather where my family is but they have heated buildings. It is warm inside. They go out into the cold for a few minutes, get into an icy car, and then drive for a few minutes and they are warm again. They don't have to spend every minute of every day in that low temperature. This is northern Vietnam's coldest winter in 10 years. They aren't prepared for this weather. There are no furnaces or insulation in the buildings and most of the windows don't have glass. There isn't a strict dividing line between indoors and outdoors: houses are built around airy courtyards and verandas, balconies and windows with wooden shutters to hold out the rain but not the breeze. It's usually very nice when the weather is warm, but now it means that everyone has to wear three or four sweaters and a jacket in the house to keep warm.

Many people now buy "bánh chưng" (traditional sticky rice cake filled with pork and green bean and wrapped in banana leaves) from the market, but my mother-in-law still makes them herself. I spent most of a day feeding a small fire under a big pot of water to boil a dozen of these heavy cakes. That was a warm day because I got to be by the fire all day.

My niece, Van Khanh, is three now and she spends her days running around the house bundled up like an eskimo. She can talk a lot more than she could last year and she really likes giving me orders. Before each meal, she would come shout at me to come down and eat. Sometimes she would come to me and grab one of my fingers in each of her tiny hands and pull to try to force me to follow her downstairs with repeated cries of "Chú xuống ăn cơm. Xuống đi! Xuống đi!" Every morning she would stand outside the door of our room and demand that I wake up and play with her. "Chú dậy đi! Dậy đi! Dậy điiiiiiiii!" The "đi" on the end of the sentence makes it imperative. Most of the sentences I hear directed at me end in "đi". Last year, she wasn't too sure of me and she was a little afraid. This year, she was always trying to stand next to me or lean on me.

We went to visit my mother-in-law's side of the family in the quiet little town of Bắc Ninh, where we met one of her cousins, a very old woman. After chatting for a while, we went for a walk with the old lady to see a few other people and then we came back to her house to have lunch (our second lunch of the day, but we couldn't really refuse). Her husband had come home while we were out and he was really happy to see us. I think he was the one that insisted that we stay for lunch. This old man sat on the floor next to me during lunch and he kept putting his arm on my shoulders and patting my leg like we were good friends. He kept wanting to drink rice "wine" with me (a weird fluorescent yellow concoction resembling Mountain Dew that came from a 5 liter plastic jug that looks like it once held automotive fluids). We drank several cups together. After lunch, we went back to the coffee table for tea and coffee. He made me a cup of coffee and then he asked to take some pictures together when he saw Ninh taking out her camera to take pictures of some of the cute kids that were in the house. We went out on the steps in front of the house so he could stand on the step and not be so short next to me. He put his arm around me and pressed his smiling wrinkled face against my shoulder like a happy kid. Then he put on his nice coat and came back to take another picture. He seemed so happy that I thought he was about to start crying. He shook my hand a lot and gave me a hug before I left. He was in the military before he retired. He doesn't speak a word of English, but I know the word for "army" and I could see the photo of him in his uniform in the display case next to the coffee table. When he explained that he was in the army, he mimed using a rifle. I think he's seen many Americans before me, but I'm the first one that he didn't have to kill. I sat in his house and ate and drank with him in peace like a family member and that made him really happy.

We're back in Sai Gon now. It's tough to go back to work after two weeks of eating and sleeping in. I put on a bit of weight over Tet and all the Vietnamese I've met since I got back say I look fatter and more handsome. I know I've been getting skinnier. I had to add a new hole to my belt to tighten it a couple of inches. Last year, I weighed myself on the scale at my in-laws' house and I was 88 kilograms. This year, I was 80 kilograms. At 1.8 meters tall, that makes my body mass index 24.7 (under 25 is "optimal"). This may explain why guys (westerners fatter than me and Vietnamese shorter than me but close to the same girth) have been saying I have a "good shape" that they would like to have. This also explains why I've been seeing abs in the mirror while I'm in the shower. The last time I was skinny enough to see my abs, I was prepubescent and didn't have a lot of musculature to speak of. This is a new sensation for me. I'm sure it won't take long to drop my Tet weight, especially since it seems that my schedule will be busier in the next few months (pacing in front of a class while teaching probably adds up to a lot of walking each week and I walk to work a lot now that we live close enough).

This update is adapted from a mass email that I sent to several friends. I don't know if it arrived or not because I only received one reply. For the benefit of those of you who weren't on my mailing list (or whose spam filters caught my email with all the attached photos), here's the update.

( Read more... )
So how are you doing?

I've been kind of busy lately. Here's the rough outline of events.

My brother-in-law came to visit for a few days while he was in town on business.
My wife went to Hong Kong for a few days and left me home alone unsupervised.
I got sick.
I got better.
My mother-in-law came to visit.
We went to see the Cao Dai temple in Tay Ninh and the Cu Chi tunnels.
I got a part-time job on the side being an English voice at a recording studio that is making some audio books.
My mother-in-law is still here.
I think my Vietnamese listening comprehension is getting a little better. My mother-in-law and wife are constantly speaking Vietnamese. They aren't very good at repeating things for me when I don't understand though. If they say something too fast for me, they only repeat the parts I understood. For example, my mother-in-law tried to ask me about rice cultivation in America. I heard something like "In America, blahblah rice blahblah rice plants?" and said I didn't understand. She clarified with something like "In America. A-me-ri-ca. Rice. Rice. You understand 'rice'?" and didn't repeat the part I missed. But it's still a bit helpful to get some extra practice.
I also seem to be the only teacher at work that treats the Vietnamese staff nicely. I smile and say hello to the "tea ladies" that clean after us and prepare snacks for the classes. They don't know any English but I use my little bit of Vietnamese with them. Now they try to talk to me when I'm between classes and they offer me leftover cakes and cookies and fruit from the corporate meetings held in the building. Being nice has its rewards.

I've been feeling rather lonely lately.
( Read more... )

For such an heavily urbanized area, there is a lot of wildlife in the city of Saigon. There are many large trees everywhere in this city. The sidewalks are buckled and cracked by the roots of giants and some smaller buildings are overwhelmed by trees that are slowly absorbing them. It's like the jungle was never truly tamed here and it is only biding its time until the upstart humans leave and the bricks and concrete can be re-absorbed into the earth.

Across the alley from our balcony, there is a large middle school. A large society of bats live in the air vents on the side of the school. Every night at sunset, a dark cloud of bats swarms out of the school and scours the air of our khu phố for insects. I am thankful for the bats, because I credit them for the fact that I rarely see mosquitoes or other bugs anymore. When I stand on the balcony at night, I can see the occasional shadow flit past me like a handkerchief of shadow blowing in the wind.

The tree in the courtyard of the school is home to the usual assortment of small sparrow-like birds. The alley outside and the bike garage on the ground floor are home to many cockroaches. I hate the cockroaches but they rarely make the climb up to our apartment. I think we have seen three or four above the ground floor since we moved here. The cockroaches provide a source of food to the geckos that walk across our walls and ceilings. As I write this, there is a ten-centimeter long lizard running along the wall over my head. I hate the cockroaches, but the geckos are cute and they eat the bugs.

In the sewer drain outside our garage door, there is a rat. We see it sometimes when we come home at night, because it uses the cover of darkness to scavenge for food in the nearby trash. It is a very lucky rat, because there is a cat that lives only three or four meters away but its owner keeps it on a leash. On three different occasions, a small mouse (not the big rat that lives outside) has entered our apartment by crawling under the door and terrified Tu Ninh but we always chase it back out.

None of these animals are entirely unexpected. However, earlier this week as I was leaving the apartment to go somewhere, I noticed a small animal hiding in the corner of the landing outside our door. A turtle. I have no idea how a turtle got there. It was alive and cautiously looking at me. It was only about 4 or 5 centimeters wide. There is no way it could have climbed up the stairs by itself. It was either carried inside by someone who lives upstairs or it was dropped through the air vent above by a bird. It was gone when I came back later that night.

Some Vietnamese friends, in an attempt to encourage me in my attempts to learn Vietnamese, have given me some stories to read to help me improve my vocabulary. These are the first two, as translated into English by me.

Story One: A Tale of Two Rice Seeds

There once was a pair of rice seeds that were kept back in order to make stock for the following season because both were good, big, healthy, and whole rice seeds.

One day, the owner intended to bring them to plant in a nearby field. The first seed whispered, "It's stupid that I must follow the owner out to the field. I don't want my body to break up in the earth. It's best I keep all this nutrition in this husk and find an ideal place to stay." And so, it chose a hidden corner in the rice storehouse to roll into.

And the second rice seed longed day and night to be brought out for planting in the earth by the owner. It would be really happy when it could begin a new life.

Time passed and the first rice seed became dried and wilted in its place in the corner of the storehouse, because it never received any water or light. Now its nutrition didn't help it at all with anything: it gradually wore out and died. Meanwhile, the second rice seed, though it broke down in the earth, grew up from its body a shiny, golden rice plant weighted down with seeds. It carried them to give life to new rice seeds.

To never shut up in its reliable husk in order to senselessly stay unbroken, but to bravely walk and silently suffer disintegration in order to contribute a small rice plant to the field of life. That is the choice of the second stock seed.

I hope that will also be the choice of you and me when we stand before this limitless field of life...


Story Two: Coffee and Cup

A group of classmates who are now successful called together to go back to visit their old teacher. After a while of chatting, they began to tell stories and complain about the pressures in work and life. Hearing this, the teacher went into the kitchen to get coffee to offer his old pupils.

He brought out very many different kinds of cups: porcelain ones, plastic ones, glass ones, even ones made of crystal. A few looked very simple, a few looked very expensive, and still others were extremely skillfully made. The teacher told the "successful people" to choose a cup and pour coffee for themselves.

After each one had a cup of coffee, the respectable teacher began gently, "If you pay attention, then you will realize this fact: who chooses the expensive cup also cares nothing for all the cheap plastic cups. Perhaps you will feel that this is really normal, for who would not want to choose the best thing for himself, but this mainly is the source of every complicated problem in your lives.

"Oh students, those cups don't have any influence at all on the coffee's quality. All you need is the coffee and not the cup at all. If normally you only stare worriedly to look for the best cups, even after that you still cast a furtive eye over the next person in order to see if their cup is more beautiful than your cup.

Let's reflect on this: a just life is coffee, yet work, money, and social status are mainly cups. And these 'cups' don't matter in defining or influencing the quality of our lives. Sometimes, because of continuing to mind 'vainglorious cups', we miss benefiting from life.

The gift that God gives to a person is coffee and not the cup at all. Thus, we should relax and sip our coffee and enjoy a beautiful, cheerful life to the end.


That's about as accurately as I can manage. I had to take a few liberties because some words in Vietnamese don't directly correspond to words in English (and vice versa). If I were going to take a few more liberties, I would probably say "to the last drop" instead of "to the end" for that last story. I really need to work on speaking and listening more than reading and writing, but my one teacher doesn't really have much time for me anymore. I'm doing what I can by myself.

My wife signed up for a Flickr account last night and used up her bandwidth allowance for the month by uploading a bunch of our wedding photos. She will be uploading even more photos next month. For those of you that are curious, the photos are here. I'm not very photogenic and I look really pasty because of the whitening retouching the photographer did, but Tu Ninh looks great.

I already mentioned how one of my former students misses me. The girl who gave me a goodbye letter on "Don't Forget Me" stationery later sent me some text messages on my phone. This weekend, another girl from the same class sent me several text messages to tell me that she doesn't like her new teacher and that the class sleeps while she teaches because she is so boring. It's nice to know that I'm missed. It makes me feel like I wasn't wasting my time trying to reach those kids.

The rear tire on our bike has gone flat several times. It has been running out of air more and more often lately. In the past few days, we stopped to get the inner tube patched a lot. We had one patch put on for 6,000 dong on Thursday afternoon, then went out for drinks with some of Ninh's friends that evening. We had to push the bike a few blocks and pay 10,000 dong to have two more patches put on. On Friday, I drove to work and when I left a few hours later, the bike started fishtailing wildly as soon as I hit the street. It was completely flat again. I had to push the bike several blocks to find another guy to patch it (for another 5,000 dong). Oddly, I passed two or three other guys who just made the universal Vietnamese gesture for "no/I don't know/I don't want it". Apparently, they want my money badly enough to sweat in the hot sun repairing my tire for 5,000 dong, but they don't want it badly enough to set their sandwich down for a few minutes of work. I guess lunchtime takes top priority.

Later that day, we took the bike to a "vehicle wash" garage and asked if they could replace the whole tire for us instead of just slapping on another patch. The tire was very worn and cracked around the edges and needed to be replaced. They said they could do it, but they didn't have the parts on hand. They sent two boys on a bike to go get a new tire and inner tube while I waited and fended off shoe shine boys who wanted to polish my new sandals. The two boys came back with the tire and tube and an old man disassembled the rear of the bike to take the wheel off. He stripped the rubber and replaced it with the new parts and then told me that the whole operation will cost us 160,000 dong (US$10). Ninh later called her father and discovered that we paid about twice as much as we should have for a tire. I didn't complain. I think the tire alone would probably cost $20 or $30 in the States.

The trip to the Bia Hoi beer garden was nice other than the problem with the tire. I had hoped that I could use it as an opportunity to practice listening to Vietnamese, but it was too loud for even Ninh to follow the conversation most of the time so I didn't stand much of a chance. I really need to try to learn more Vietnamese somehow. Ninh keeps blaming me for "not learning", but I don't know how she expects me to learn when she doesn't teach me anything. She talks at me in Vietnamese without explaining what the words are and then acts like it's my fault that I don't understand. My previous school offered free Vietnamese lessons but I didn't sign up for classes because the teachers are southerners and Ninh (and I) would prefer for me to learn the northern dialect. Now I wish that I had gone to those classes anyway. I would rather speak the southern dialect than nothing at all. I saw an ad in an English language magazine for a training center only a few blocks from my new school. They have teachers from the north and the south and they teach both dialects to foreigners. It's probably expensive, but I should probably check it out anyway. I'm getting really frustrated with Ninh either claiming I'm "not learning" when I don't understand something or laughing at me when I pronounce something wrong. I need to find a way to learn that involves more actual instruction with constructive feedback and less humiliation. I've been here for seven months. I should really know a lot more by now. I could have accomplished so much more in that time with a little bit of help. It makes me sick to think of how much time has been wasted that could have been used to make me at least partially fluent.

I want to be able to talk to my family and I want to be able to talk to the people I meet in the city (outside of work). There are teachers at my school that have been in Vietnam for years and don't seem to have even a basic grasp of the language. There are some that show no sign of knowing the language at all and there are some who only use the same few words all the time. There are a couple of teachers that apparently don't know any Vietnamese other than "oi" (which basically means "hey" and is used to get someone's attention when you use it with their name). They stick "oi" on the end of every name like it's a title or something, and they don't even pronounce it properly. There's an old woman who has been coming to Vietnam for 11 years and she seems to speak a lot of Vietnamese. I don't know all of the words she speaks, but I can tell that her pronunciation is awfully atonal (as if she learned without being told that the tones mattered). I have heard that people like that are pretty incomprehensible because they have what is essentially a very thick accent. I don't want to be like those people.