Chuan's remedial economic lesson

It has been quite an amazing adventure living in Ha Noi. A month has gone by and I can not believe that it was that long ago that I was having dinner at Sitka & Spruce with Essie.

I have been incredibly busy at work, jumping into a project in the middle of a deadline crisis, as if I had a choice. Fortunately we have a team of talented, excellent and hard workers and we were able to put together a great Design Concept package.
The Director of the Viet Nam office - Don Conning asked me to accompany him to the presentation as an interpreter and introduced me as the firm's associate helping to manage the Ha Noi office. I thought my Vietnamese was somewhat rusty but apparently did well enough that the client accepted the package and asked us to make a few corrections and paid the submitted invoice a few days later.

Don was extremely pleased with our work and sent out an office wide email praising the team.
A day later I was asked to help with another Concept Design package due ten days later.
It seems that there is no rest for the weary!!! That was just blowing smoke. But I would rather be busy than not and this is what I signed up for.

Pretty exciting time in my career and it seems that my career has been heading in this direction in the last few years. Hopefully this is for the long haul. To make a long story short Don told me that in his view my probationary period was over after the first project delivery and he is very pleased to have me on the team.

Never has sweeter words been spoken, professionally speaking of course, to me. Now I can start to look for a permanent place to live. It's been quite a challenge to be living out of a couple of suitcases for more than a month and I look forward to be able to go to the market and cook again. How I missed the cooking process, especially after looking atall the fresh produce, live seafood and wonderful tree-ripened fruits.

Ok, now onto the economic side of life here. I have been holding off on writing about this subject until I get a better sense of what the situation is for many Vietnamese or Hanoian and I am sure I am only scratching the surface. As one expat blogger's name is "Layered" really said it all.

I was told that the average here is $1,200 to $1,400 USD and the exchange rate is around 20,000 Vietnamese Dong to the dollar, yes it is not a mistake. People here work so hard trying to eke out a living.

Here is the mind bogging insanity of it, just imagine selling a cup of tea on the corner for 1,000 dong each, about 5 cents. A newspaper hawker selling newspaper for 500 dong, women carrying baskets filled with vegetables, fruits, bread, sugar canes, and all that anyone can imagined, balanced on the ends of flat bamboo poles walking for hours to make a few thousand dong a day, seven days a week. The look of perseverance and suffering on the faces of mostly women who do this selling makes me want to cry.

The famous Vietnamese ice coffee sells for 12,000 to 30,000 (high end coffee shop), while a bowl of Pho is 20,000 to 25,000. Then there is fresh pilsner style beer for around 5,000 dong a glass and cheaper if you go to a beer hall with your friends and order by the five litres dispenser.

On the other hand there are very well connected and wealthy people being driven in Mercedes, Range Rovers, Bentleys, Audis and Roll Royces. The cost for these vehicles are astronomical due to the 200% plus import duty and I think I am way shy on the percentage.

By the way, the hotel room that my company is paying for cost $60 a day and it is for two months. What the F.... How can I make any sense of this? I don't know, I do feel a bit of guilt every now and then about my situation and I hope the feeling never goes away. Hopefully it will provide me with with a form of reality check so that I don't become callous or oblivious.

Earlier today my mobile phone got stolen in the Old Quarter as I was walking around. I had an inkling that something was not right after being brushed by a young guy. But after walking for five, six hours it did not registered until a few minutes later when I noticed that the outside zipper of my shoulder bag was opened.

At any rate writing this put things in perspective and I am in many ways very fortunate to be where I am at the moment.

A few photos for your viewing pleasure.

Fresh seasonal fruits: Tangerines, custard apples, chom chom - the hairy red fruits

Green papaya salad with eel and herbs

Sheets of rice noodles and Vietnamese pork patties

 Sitting on the sidewalk eating yet another bowl of delicious noodles

For a little contrast - the last chicken I rotisseried in Seattle before leaving for Viet Nam

 Local albacore tuna sashimi from Washington

1,000 years and a small coincidence

Ha Noi is celebrating it's 1,000th year anniversary all this week!!! Imagine that! How many cities can make that claim?

Here is a coincidence to ponder but I suggest you do not make too much of it, just enjoy it for a moment:

The celebration officially began on Friday, Oct 1, 2010 and will last for ten days. I happened to have chosen my starting date on the same day out of pure ignorance. I am not planning on staying for such a long time at this job.
I also will celebrate my B-day on Oct 4th in my country of birth and in the capital city.

Ok, enough navel gazing and onto what's happening with the celebration and it's effects.

Saturday evening as I was walking to dinner on a four lane one way street, I ran into a massive moped traffic jam and I mean jam. Every available centimeter of road surface was taken up by a slowly moving mass of two wheelers. The mopeds then all of a sudden, started jumping the curbs and riding on the sidewalk on both sides. It is quite disconcerting to have them buzzing in all around you and not knowing if at any moment now you are going to get clobbered and there is nowhere to go.

Apparently they were all heading towards Hoan Kiem Lake for a celebratory show and fireworks, so in effect all the streets heading north towards the center of the city were equally jammed.

So I ducked down a side street after deciding that I am not going to take any chances of getting run over and found a place to eat and wait out the moped mob. An hour later you could almost cross the street without encountering any  moving vehicle.  Well, ALMOST is really relative here.

Today I walked to the lake in the morning to take advantage of the breezy and cool conditions. The streets were strangely quiet, I found out, due to a race around the lake and the police were out in full force ticketing people who do not habitually obey traffic rules like: red light means no go, NOT go slow into the intersection and then speed up through while dodging cross traffic.

The cops also blocked of the sidewalk in sections so you can only walk a short distance along the shore of the lake and then have to turn around and jaywalk across to the other side to get around the barriers to continue on. By the way, they were carrying long and nasty looking batons.

The runners were mostly Vietnamese men and women, quite a few of whom were running barefooted while others were fully geared out in the latest running shoes - now made mostly in Viet Nam for Nike, Adidas etc...

I left the lake area and meandered into the Old Quarter spending quite a pleasant morning getting lost in the narrow winding streets that changes names every so often.

Tonight I will brave the streets again and go out for dinner since I gotta eat again.

 Around the lake, relatively speaking.

 An oasis of calm.

 Ok, I think I can use the sidewalk.

Karaoke anyone? Everyone? It's very popular and all concentrated in one part of the city.

 So I made it out to see the mad, mad traffic heading towards the lake for the evening festivities. Decided to turned around after a few blocks due to the noxious fumes. Will try again tomorrow night via a different route. I am determined to at least get a close up view, after all how many chances in a lifetime does one get to celebrate a 1,000 year old birthday.

Of course it's only food but....

I had a feeling it's not going to be too long before food is the subject. I would not be me otherwise.
Food is everywhere in Ha Noi, perhaps you have seen photos of people sitting on itsy bisty stools eating away while thousands of mopeds puttered by.

Well, count me as one additional stool sitter-eater. Every morning so far I have eaten beef pho, chicken pho, noodles with grilled pork, noodles with pig feet and congealed blood (sounds icky but delicious to Asians), noodles with shredded stuff, noodles with ground crab patties, sheets of noodles and roasted pork.
As you can tell noodles and pho are everywhere, yet each one is different from the next.

As a side bar the last time Essie and I was in Ha Noi we followed our noses and trailed a wonderful aroma of pho broth down an alley one evening and found a number of large pots simmering away on a sidewalk and yes, every available space is use for something in the city.

Unfortunately for us the broth is for the next morning pho. Well I found it this time in the morning without looking for it. The broth was as delicious as we had imagined but to my chagrin the noodles were mealy after being overcooked and expensive to boot.
How expensive you may ask? A typical bowl of pho, noodle soup or what have you on the street usually cost 20,000 dong, the equivalent of about one dollar and five cents. This one cost 30,000, a whopping 50% costlier and adding insult to injury, an inferior bowl.

Today I moved to a long stay hotel provided by my company for the next two months leaving behind the intensely busy Cathedral neighborhood. This part of town, curiously, is filled with Japanese/Korean restaurants and Karaoke bars.

I found an upscale Vietnamese restaurant - Hoang Yen - Redefining  Tradition is their catch phrase. The decor is one of the most gorgeous so far in Ha Noi with quite a few private rooms where it seems the young "it" crowd have reserved. Redef...Trad...is nothing but a couple of words. The food was so poorly prepared that the cooking staff should be forced to apprenticed at one of the street food stalls to learn how to cook.
There were seven front of the house staff hoovering in the foyer working hard at looking busy, far from the actual concept of being gracious, the management can take serious lessons from other high-end restaurants.
The bo luc lac - shaking beef - was so tough to chew I wondered if it was in fact horse meat for a moment.

My version of this dish kick this restaurant's butt.

The sauteed cauliflower was prepared with so much cornstarch that I thought it came from a bad Chinese joint. It goes to show you that in a great food town there can be really bad food. On the other hand there may be something else going on in those private rooms that I am not privy to. Nah!

Ok, while the food has generally been excellent, there is not very much vegetables available at the food stalls which specialize in one specific dish each . To get my daily dose of fiber I have been eating plenty fruits and my addiction is custard apples, tree ripened and dripping with massive amount of deliciousness.

I can't get enough custard apples!!!! Don't worry, I will restrain myself.

Check out the photos and good eating y'all!

 Basket of ripe crunchy small persimmons - a specialty of the north.

 Yep, custard apples - yum yum yum.

 Noodle with fish chunks and turmeric - the yellow coloring.

 Vietnamese crepe filled with bean sprouts, pork and shrimp, notice the fresh herbs and rice paper for wrapping with.

And finally a bowl of pho with fresh hot chili. Yay!!!

Where indeed is TED?

Me! A blogger! Stranger things have happened.

Ever since I decided that in the US opportunities for architects are limited I began to entertain the thoughts of working overseas. At least in Seattle the unemployment rate for the design profession is awful and will continue for the next few years I think. For my designer friends I hope that I am 99% wrong. So much for reality.

After starting an extensive but casual search process I decided to start a blog if I was to accept an offer somewhere other than in the US. So the blog was created but no posting until now.

Amazingly I received an offer in August, 2010 for a posting in Ha Noi, Viet Nam.

It took all of five minutes before I decided to accept.

So here I am sitting in a hotel lobby in Pho Nha Tho (the Cathedral Quarter) in writing this blog.

My intention was to write a sort of love letter to the US Northwest but it can wait for a little while until I feel more settled in Ha Noi. There is so much going on here in the past two days that I feel a need to write some of it down before I forget or more likely overwhelmed.

 This is a relatively calm street scene if only for a moment.

 These women work so hard every day carrying baskets of fruits to sell for so little that it touches my heart.

And of course a bowl of steaming pho for breakfast, lunch and or dinner. The broth is much clearer than in the US with no sprouts or basil on the side but some nice and hot chilies, not the common green jalapenos.

The city is ever Buzzing, Beeping, Whirring, Roaring, humming, vibrating, jammed packed and then there is a momentary lull and then starts up again, pulsating from early morning till late at night. So many people trying and working extremely hard to earn a living and striving to make a better life for their families. I can only imagine what the unemployment rate is.

And then there is the rain, buckets of wet warm rain, I pulled on my hi-tech cap, put my hi-tech jacket over my shoulder as it comes down. It rained so hard that the choice I have is to get drenched or half drenched underneath all this gear in my own sweat since it is so humid that the gear trapped all the moisture. The Gore folks probably never did any testing in the Southeast Asian rainy season.

The flooded streets reminded me of when I was just a boy making paper boats and letting them float down the street for a few doors before sinking in the deluge.

It's starting to rain.