Going to Nam

Sorry for the lack of entries over the last couple of weeks. After we got into Vietnam I found it hard to both find the time to write and also to simply log-in to Blogger (hmm, the great chinese firewall caused me similar angst).

Anyways, the Spaniard and I had an incredible time in Vietnam. It's a great country with tons to see that definitely lived up to expectations. While there we traveled to Hanoi, Halong Bay, Hoi An, Da Nang, Hue, and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). I'll get to a detailed travelogue later, but before I do here are some of my overall impressions of the country.

• There are plenty of tourists, but the country still feels a bit unspolied. They know how to deal with tourists, but it hasn't gotten too commercialized. For example, there were virtually no western stores or restaurants. In fact, restaurants and stores were often extensions of a family's home.
• The Vietnamese, on average, definitely tend to be on the smaller side (I'd say even smaller than the Chinese), maybe it's all the healthy food they eat. . . The spanish language has institutionalized this observation as I discovered that the spanish word for vietnamese is "vietnamITAs." For those of you who know spanish, the suffix should mean something to you. I was told by the locals a few times that I was Vietnamese sized (yes I know I'm short why did they need to point that out), but we as a group tended to stick out a bit due to the Spaniard. One of our guides provides an excellent example of how much he stuck out.

• The people in Vietnam, by and large, are extremely friendly. Given the history between our two countries I expected more of an undercurrent of hostility or at least stand-offishness. However people were generally friendly and smiling, especially when they had something to sell. Although, even when they didn't they would say hello as they passed us on motorbikes or on the street. The Spaniard's friend, who traveled with us and works at the World Bank in Hanoi, explained that the leader of the communist party, who lost many family members in the war, posted online to a citizen's forum (which apparantely is pretty big there) a response to a question about whether he held any ill-will to the Americans. He said something like "Yes the american government was imperialistic, but we should not hold that against the citizens of the country. Plus that was the past and we need to look to the future."


• Two types of architecture predominate and battle it out on the streets, french colonial and chinese. The influences are everywhere.

(a tomb outside Hue)

(the post office in Saigon. . . oops I mean Ho Chi Minh City)

• There is no doubt that the country is poor. The Spaniard's friend, said that the governments goal is to lift GDP/capita from $650 to over $1000 in order to be considered a "middle income" country. That being said, it appeared that people's basic needs were being met, it was more that things were less developed. This is especially true of their infrastructure. To get between Hanoi and the center of the country and then to Saigon the options were two 1 hour flights or a total of 40 hours on a train. . . (We definitely chose the more civilized way).
  
• The entire country is cheap, incredibly so actually. At 16,000 Dong to the dollar we had to get used to a completely different price level. Good meals where we'd order appetizers, entrees, beer, etc would be $5 per person. Opening bids at markets and stores would be $3 for a T-Shirt, $4 for a tie, $5 for a shawl (and quoted in dollars which are accepted as easily as dong). Even overpriced tourist bottles of water or coke would be $0.66. It almost made haggling not worth it, but fear not I still did it (remember cheapskate here.) However I would request that we negotiate in dong. I don't know. . . getting a discount of 5,000-10,000 dong felt better than a discount of $0.33 - $0.66.


• Despite being incredibly cheap, the food was incredibly good. Full of fresh healthy ingredients stir fried with tons of exotic and great flavors. It's also pretty healthy (as long as you stay away from deep fried spring rolls. . . ) I've grown a new appreciation for Vietnamese food, which I will be indulging on Argyle street upon my return.
  
• Traffic is a nightmare . . . everywhere. The only cars you see are mostly buses, taxis, and official vehicles. However the lack of cars is more than compensated by an abundance of motorbikes. Everybody in the country seems to have a motorbike which they seem to drive 24 hours a day. We read a statistic(in the inflight magazine upon departure of all places) that says there are 25 (unofficially 50) motorbikes for every car and despite the source we have no reason to dispute this. Moreover, these motos are always overloaded. . . dangerously so. . .You will see families of four perched on 1 moto all the time (Yes that little head you see is a child standing on a moto).



• Unfortunately, despite the massive amount of motos at every turn, there are few traffic lights. Supposedly they've only started installing them in the last few years. As a result, crossing the street was always an adventure and I felt a little uneasy everytime I did it. The local trick, which is very disconcerting, was to just start crossing the street at a constant predictable clip and let the motos avoid you. The spaniard's friend employed a modified technique of directing traffic (ie using hand motions to tell them to tell them to stop or go). As you can see it took a bit for me to get used to either method.

Despite my concerns, I ended up being a street crossing pro by the end of the journey. Needless to say I survived to have plenty of adventures in the country. More on those later. . .

Staying close to home

Ever since getting back from Beijing I've been in Hong Kong, or the environs like Shenzhen. Part of it has been forced on me, since I needed to get visas for my upcoming trip to Vietnam with the Spaniard (via Bangkok and Singapore - got a love how the student budget forces some unique itineraries and connections), and a GSB sponsored trip to Bangalore India to interview applicants to the Class of 09. No Passport = No travel, so HK it has been.

Not that it has been a bad thing, as I've gotten a chance to better know this amazing city(seriously everybody should put HK on their list of places to see). The most fascinating thing has been the contrasts and blends of east and west that I've been noticing on a daily basis:

• The street markets springing up outside Louis Vuitton stores.
• Buildings with dilapadated facades sporting beautiful lobbies.
• Modern skyscrapers being built with bamboo scaffolding
• HK Chinese sporting perfect English/Aussie/American/Candadian accents (Hi Josekin and Ivan!)
• Walgreen type stores selling chinese folk remedies, etc.
• Whole-Food type supermarket seafood sections selling live(well live before you purchase) fish swimming in tanks

Another thing I've noticed has been a subtle sense of insecurity amongst people here. Not insecurity on whether this is a great place, everybody seems to know that. More a sense of insecurity that they'll lose what they have. It takes many forms:

• The HK tourism board and government has plastered "HK: Asia's World City" on everything they produce. I've been to other "World Cities," and none of them make such an effort to proclaim their worldliness. It's like the kid who joins the popular crowd and has to remind everybody he's cool in order to reaffirm his position.
• By extension, the news reports I've heard, and been able to understand, talk about improving city services in order to "continue our status as a world city."
• People aren't shy about criticizing the Mainland, seemingly to distance themselves. In an almost reflexive manner, anytime I mention visiting the Mainland the conversation turns to how provincial and sleazy it is, esp when compared to Hong Kong. Not that they're completely off-base, but there can be some exagerations. For example, everyone here loves to cite either that everything is fake or that the need to be careful what you eat in the mainland since they have "fake eggs." Nobody themself has seen such a creation, but everybody knows of somebody who did. I find it a bit hard to belive since I've never seen these myself, and I mean why would you fake an egg when you can fake Adidas jackets?
• Anything that shows HK as anything less than miles ahead of the Mainland gets undue press. For example, the front page of the South China Morning Post had a front page article, and requisite commentary, that HK students in Australia were failing English proficiency tests at an equal rate as those in the Mainland. The tone seemed not so much to be aghast at the high faliure rate of 45ish%, but that the Mainland student failure rate was only slightly worse.

In a way, I can understand where this insecurity is coming from. HK has come so far so quickly. Recently I went to the HK History museum and saw exhibits highlighting Japanese occupation, the extremely overcrowded tenanments, unrest in the population that occurred not that long ago. In the pictures HK looked more "3rd world" than the modern metropolis we see today.

I guess the appearances were reality back then because during the fall, my grandmother's best friend, who is originally from China, heard I was coming here and got concerned enough to reach out and give me a lot of advice like: "watch out for kidnapping, because during the Japanese war(i.e. WWII) it happened a lot. Don't wear anything valuable at all, because during the Japanese war . . " She painted a picture of an extremely dangerous place, so much so that my grandmother's first question when I talked with her a couple of weeks ago was "Have you been pickpocketed yet?" A lot has changed in 60 years, but after having been to the museum I can see where her concern came from.

Having come so far so fast, I can see why HK might be worried about losing their position, especially since they are beholden to those North of the border.

One worry is that the government in Beijing starts meddling too much or worse abolishes the special status HK enjoys. Not that anybody I know sees that as too much of a risk, China would lose too much face by going against the agreement. More importantly having a vibrant HK benefits China through having an open port to the west, and meddling too much would make "one country two-systems" an even harder potential sell for Taiwan.

More worisome is the renewed competition from the Mainland. I keep hearing the word "marginalization" which highlights the HK anxiety. A lot of HK's success has been its status as entrepot into China. However as China, particularly Shanghai, booms there's concern that people will go directly to China instead of going through HK when. That's a definite worry, but HK has a lot of expertise and as many here like to say "it's all hardware and no software" up there. It still has advantages but HK can't rest on its laurels, as the mainlanders are catching on quickly.

However, competition will do HK good, and HK has overcome many challenges in the past as it will in the future. It's a dynamic place that will always find the next opportunity. As professor Young said in International Commercial Policy last spring. "The lesson from HK is that the talented will succeed no matter what."

Football and Scrambled Eggs

Nothing reminds you of how removed you are from your home life as trying to recreate familiar traditions in a foreign places. There are familiar elements, but it's never quite the same. Eating Christmas and Christmas Eve dinners at chinese restaurants in Hangzhou and Shanghai was my first taste of this, but going to a Super Bowl party this morning was another such instance.

Yes, that's not a typo, I woke my ass up at 5:45am this morning in order to see the Super Bowl. Given the nasty time difference, the 6:30pm EST kick-off was 7:30am here in Hong Kong. Given the timing I normally would have forsaken seeing the Super Bowl since I'm not a huge sports fan, and I'm an even lesser fan of early mornings. However, given it was the Bears I felt obligated to show some Chicago pride here in the South China Sea. I didn't have any Bears gear, so I Chicagoed up by wearing my Cubs cap and Chicago GSB T-Shirt.

Our destination was a Super Bowl party being hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce here in HK at a bar in Lan Kwai Fong that another American exchange student found out about. A number of us went, including some of the Germans and French students. Here's how early it was, LKF was deserted:

The weirdness began the minute we walked in. Given the hour, the food spread consisted of your favorite breakfast foods and the beverages of choice was coffee and OJ. Not your normal Super Bowl party spread. There was some beer, but you had to wait until 8 or 8:30 given the liquor laws here. . . Not that anybody was too eager to booze it up, especially since most of the crowd had to go to work after the game. As students though, we had no such constraints:

Not that we drank that much, I had the equivilent of one pint. I drank much more coffee, so much that somebody said "You really are an addict."

Another difference was that we received the international feed on ESPN Asia, so no Super Bowl ads!!!!! I never realized how important they are to enjoying the game until they weren't there. Also, when there are no ads you begin to realize how many commercial breaks there are in football. I guess ESPN Asia couldn't sell any super bowl ads, because during breaks for US ads we kept seeing the same promos for other ESPN Asia sports programming: Rugby, Soccer, SportsCenter, etc, on an infinite loop. The only paid ad I saw was for AsiaExpat.com . . . Amazing to consider that in the states 30 seconds go for $2MM, and here they can't sell any time.

Plus the commentary was different, a lot more educational. As in "10 yards equals another 1st down for the team with possession." "Let us explain how both teams arrived here," and then proceeded to explain the playoff system.

However, that commentary was better then the Chamber of Commerce's emcee who wouldn't shut-up. There were prizes for trivia and he used it as an excuse to constantly talk. Imagine some middle-aged meathead blowhard getting control of a microphone and living out his dream of being a sportscaster on a captive audience. BTW did you know the turf make-up of Dolphin stadium? Well I found out because his company, for which he is regional VP, made the turf for the game. See what I mean? Plus, when he found out that there were non-Americans in the crowd he took the opportunity to say we were watching real football and how it was infinitely better than rugby and cricket and soccer. . . Way to show some hospitality!

All in all, I had a fun time, depsite the Bears loss which was extremely painful, but without Doritos, beer, and Bud Light ads it wasn't a Super Bowl party. Plus, I'm missing out on the civic grieving, which, I learned after the 2003 Cubs debacle, is an important part of the healing process.

HK's western facade can lull you into a sense of being close to home, this morning reminded me of how far away I really am.