All Entries in the "Featured Peeks" Category
In Vietnam: Use your noodle!
Hoi An, Quang Nam, Vietnam — December 17, 2016
As a young Vietnamese boy, who was practicing his English, said to me last evening “Good morning!” He was so proud of himself that I responded in Vietnamese: “Good morning to you, young man” even though it was well past 8 pm.
My soy in Hoi An
I’m spending the winter on the coast in Central Vietnam at Hoi An, an ancient city of about 500,000 which, if it were in Dong (Vietnamese currency), would be about $22. It’s very nice here, even in rainy season, although the fields are flooded and getting to town for food requires irrigation boots and hungry perseverance.
This too will pass, or I’ll soon be swimming in the East Sea. I keep a fresh pair of swimming trunks near the door just in case, along with a bottle of French Champagne for some mystical voyage that may be in the wings.
This morning the river is over its banks. My pathway is flooded but I have beer, cheese, tomatoes, baguette, a can or two of unidentified fish and plenty of music. The silver lining is that my neighbor is bringing me chicken and rice because she is worried about me. I’ll have to fake complete helplessness so as to assure dinner as well.
The price of rowboats is up and business at the beach is down. The sun is expected to come out in January. Everyone here just smiles and goes along with the flow, but I hope not literally. Can we say sand bags?
I may look like an old fart but I’m a bona fide mountain old fart (alpinus crabiscus flatulentus) and capable of keen basic survival and remarkably clear thought when Mother Earth gets pissed off. Ja sure…You betcha.
Two of the finest chefs on Cua Dai Street.
In Colorado it is often too dry. Here in Quang Nam Province everything is too damn wet. Even the dust is wet. Even the dry goods are wet. If they had dry cleaning and static electricity they would be wet too.
My dentist, originally from the Bay Area, who served as a Special Forces medic in South East Asia, told me he was so wet for his tour that he swore he would move to the dry high desert. So, after the service, he moved to Cedaredge where the sun is high and the skin cream is in every cupboard.
Xin chao!
The Chinese took over Vietnam in 2000 BC, stopped to wash their dirty socks (see Chinese laundry) then had to wait until 900 AD for them to dry. In those 1000 years these new tenants had a major impact on the language. Then in the 1600s the new landlords, the French, Romanized the language which makes it easier to read and write for us Westerners.
Learning Vietnamese is like a shaky morning wino trying to work on a jigsaw puzzle from his cardboard bed on the street, only a little more unsettling.
I seem to be butchering Vietnamese quite nicely but learning some very useful Australian from my new mates here. Most of it isn’t appropriate for the parlor. Imagine that.
When I’m too tired to study I go for walks around town which are often delightful, although eyeballing the hens in my soy can result in a ferocious attack by a skinny junior rooster who fears no one.
Flooding downtown has chased all the tourists from town which leaves more noodles and beer for the rest of us. Although many of the local businesses are suffering, everyone takes the high water in stride. (Kenh14 VN Photo)
My favorite pastime is watching people wrapped up in plastic bags, driving motorbikes in water up to their knees from an elevated porch downtown with cheroot and ice-cold LaRue beer in hand.
In the ancient town of Hoi An capitalism rages. It would put Madison Avenue to shame. “You buy something? yells the lady in the shop across the narrow street. Yesterday troupes of go-getters were trying to sell me anything from a plastic rain suit to a thorough ear cleaning (and eyebrow trim) to plump little piglets in a burlap sack. I’m a sucker for a good salesman and I bought everything they had.
Ba Le Market is even more stimulating than downtown (in a fruits and vegetables kind of way) although I did manage to buy two chartruese bath towels with little yellow puppies on them. Prices are more fixed here than in the center where one never pays the first three or four prices chanted or scribbled down.
That’s very pedestrian of you
Like most emerging places in the world if you are on foot it is clear that you must not be able to afford other modes of transport. If, as Bob Marley said, “Me feet be me only chariot” you could find yourself in limbo. The street crossings are marked for decoration only. Go ahead. Try it if you don’t believe me.
Yesterday I almost collided with a toothless grandma carrying a ten-foot piece of rebar, wearing a faded Giants cap, on a chopped Yamaha. That’s all I can remeber about the incident. I’m not sure she even took note of it. At least she didn’t try to sell me anything. In the real New World Order she would be delivering a piza and listening to Bach too.
Annoying horns, better than wrecks, blast at every intersection rounding out the chaotic scenario. Schools of pedalling fish pass pagodas by on bicycles It is something to behold but not at all over the top. Life is celebrated all around me. A smile and a tear.
Jimmy, the local pot dealer wears a hat with an American flag on it but like most Americans has never read Thomas Jefferson. He looks like someone who needs to direct his intellect in other more creative ways but I doubt he will. Jimmy is a big Dodger fan and my love of baseball creates opportunities in the herbal market place.
He wants to move to California.
If the creek don’t rise…
Meanwhile the neighbors see me as a combination Damon Runyan/ Walter Cronkite. They think I’m writing an important story with international, even cosmic, implications when actually I am day dreaming or taking an afternoon nap.
I haven’t seen so much as one cop in three weeks. Probably some commie plot.
Excellent Eats
In Hoi An a baby’s first word is not always Mama or Papa but often Cao Lau (a pork- based noodle dish with crisp-fried onion, sliced pork and assorted greens.) It is traditionally eaten for breakfast.
Today I sit munching incredible chicken and noodles with chopsticks and tiny napkins perched on what looks to be plastic children’s furniture. Then there are spring rolls and grilled tofu along with ginger fish sauce After just three weeks I have become pathetically addicted to the food.
Watch out for the little green peppers. They make jalapeños taste like tapioca pudding. The red ones are even hotter. The only known antidote is yellow snow that must be imported from the mountains in faraway China. The Central coast is known for spicy food which is often exported to the sets of Hanoi and Saigon (HCMC) dramas (soap operas) to induce tears.
Over 45% of Vietnamese words have origins in Chinese. 60% of these translate loosely as “Let’s stop and eat”
In the vegetarian restaurants on Li Thai Do when a tourist asks for
a fork they have to send one of the kids to the neighbors to borrow one.
Start with the Can Lau and you’ll discover what might be the healthiest cuisine on the planet. Just ask that strapping water buffalo in the rice paddy next door.
After a nice bowl of noodles I wander down my soy toward my house in Cam Chau neighborhood. Ah, here we are, at my steep, slippery wheel chair access ramp that whispers “please be careful in the rain or you may end up in a one.”
Here comes my Vietnamese teacher. I have to go in now.
– Kevin Haley
Next time:
“Crossing the International Date Line Single”
“Go upstairs.” – response from Dung (pronounced Jzung), my Vietnamese neighbor when I asked what I should do if the flood water started coming into the house (meaning unplugging the appliances, securing the porch plants and turning off the electricity and protecting the furniture).
Antidote for mistletoe in the wings?
After more than 50 years in the laboratory scientists think they may have stumbled onto an effective antidote for mistletoe. Sure enough, it’s nothing more than a strand or two of Creole Garlic! The researchers suggest wrapping one’s Christmas tree with the stuff, like the popcorn stringing ritual, and hanging the remaining garlic all around the house. One scientists says he even hangs a clove or two from his car mirror. Besides repelling unwanted advances of the opposite sex over the holidays, the garlic adds another decorative dimension when carefully interspersed with Christmas lights, bulbs and icicles. In addition to all this, most researchers say that holiday visits, and vampire traffic in general, drop almost in half when the garlic is displayed. Have a happy Christmas.
GATHERERS ARRIVING DAILY
(Montrose) The airport, no sooner back to normal with the last of the out-of-towndeer and elk hunters vamoosing, is now inundated with another nightmare anthropological group. This year the annual migration of rifle totters is accentuated by the presence of more than 100,000 gatherers.
The gatherers, the secondary component to the ancient order of humankind, have long been linked to hunters, making up a precedent to agrarian sects, Sumerian brew masters and the more sophisticated Puritan-Abolitionist-Yankee Insurance Linkage Conspiracy.
The gatherers, a rough, hungry looking pack of beggars, wasted no time in their struggle to feed themselves and their shabby offspring. Roots, berries, small trees and shrubs fell before the mighty onslaught. Later in the afternoon the barbaric hordes confiscated parking bunkers, lights, road signs, county commissioners and even bits of asphalt before moving on to high country redoubts along the Uncompahgre Plateau, rainy Dry Creek and the painfully crooked Straights of Colonese Guinea.
“Frankly we’re happy to have these folks around this time of the year,” quipped Melvin Toolini, executive director of the Chief Colorow Soil Conservation District. “Not only do they haul out a lot of debris but they keep the hunters in check.”
Gatherers, associated with hunters since before Freud, are quieter and usually far more sober than the average orange-clad meat seeker. They travel in small bands (often without a decent bass player), shadowed by teeming ox carts crammed full of everything from discolored banana peels to rusty snuff cans to impartial elk droppings to soggy balls of string to curious Spam tins to discarded passages of the United States Constitution.
“We observed one hunched-over gatherer attempting to digest the Bill of Rights just the other afternoon on Simms Mesa,” said Toolini, “but the federals happened by, and with the aid of complacency, succeeded, in driving the madman off into the dark Forest of Illiteracy.
For the uninitiated, the Constitution and Bill of Rights are very dangerous documents that, falling into the wrong hands, could threaten our way of life here in Corporate America. Recreational application of this kind of propaganda usually leads to heroin use.
The gatherers are expected to remain in the region until everything is gathered. Then they will move to the Confront Range where their massive warehouses are located.
– Kashmir Horseshoe
Earwigs, Boxelders Say Thanks
(Ouray, CO Don’t Bug Me Press November 24, 2016)
Local earwigs and boxelder bugs say thanks for another great season. Both species claim record growth despite the dry weather of the early summer.
Late rains saved what might have been a disaster for both species. The resurgence of activity in August alone topped last years’ numbers and sets a positive precedence.
Most say they are already looking forward to spring.
The crawling insects are currently preparing to go back down into the ground where they will spend the winter months. Although often quite tedious at times, the teetering relationship between human and insect continues to spew a live and let live attitude.
Local fruit bats, tired of a constant diet of mosquitoes, have announced plans to sponsor a going away dinner for the bugs. The exact date and time were not disclosed as the flying predators want it to be a surprise.
-Syd Fardt
“Next to a circus there ain’t nothin’ that packs up and tears out quicker than the Christmas spirit.” – Ken Hubbard
Packer Reunion Set
(Lake City Daze Gone By November , 2016)
The semi-annual Alfred Packer family reunion has been rescheduled to the last weekend in November to be more in keeping with the original weather from momentous occasions gone by.
According to the Hinsdale County Sheriff’s Office more than 400 people, who claim to be at least shirttail relatives of the famous cannibal, will enjoy baked beans, potato salad, corn-on-the-cob, coleslaw, Jell-O salad, watermelon, lemonade, and marshmallows.
Meat in any form was conspicuously missing from the menu.
Participants have already filed for a permit to use some 30 acres in the nearby San Juan National Forest, east of Creede. All have filed documents asserting that they have not and will not engage in survival activities that might be deemed offensive, even repulsive to mainstream America. Relatives will host an open house on November 15 to answer questions and calm fears as to plans in the woods.
Cannibals are people too, in fact it can be argued that they are super people,” said Gayle Packer, a supposed great, great grand niece of the famous Packer. “I am here today to tell you that all cannibals are not bad.”
A tongue-in-cheek vegetarian barbecue, featuring carrots, barley, broccoli, asparagus, corn, squash, potatoes, black beans and rice as well as a freshly fattened vegetarian (cooked over a bed of simmered coals) will be served free of charge on Tuesday night.
Expected at this year’s reunion are descendants of the victims George Noon, James Humphrey and Israel Swan (all alleged Packer finger food). All of these men had managed to procreate before meeting up with Packer, thus insuring that their surnames, at least, survived the nauseating picnic.
Former Civil War veteran Al Packer was indicted in 1883 after he confessed that he had murdered Shannon Wilson Bell in self-defense (for the second time) and had eaten several Democrats in 1874, during an aborted journey from the Ute Camp of Chief Ouray to the goldfields of Breckenridge, some 125 miles away. Although convicted of every crime within his reach he reportedly died in his bed of indigestion in Littleton in 1907.
As to Packer’s odd capacity for survival, he not only escaped from jail in Saguache (certainly no small accomplishment) but he also managed to hideout until March of 1883 when he was once more arrested in connection with a banquet of crimes. He subsequently served 17 years at Colorado State Penitentiary where he was a model prisoner.
He finally won his release in 1900 thanks to attorneys for the Colorado Restaurant Association that, figuring he was more of a public relations problem in jail than out, paid the legal fees. Further memory places Packer back in Littleton where he was hit by a tourist bus and succumbed to injuries in 1909. Other accounts record him successfully winning the Hinsdale County Commissioners race in 1906, barely edging out professional wrestling standout Tub “No Neck” Carl Sr. by 3 votes.
– Uncle Pahgre
“One of the serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity.” – Andrew Carnegie
