Switching Hotels

This is Yellow House, where my mother has been since arriving here two months ago. We have decided to move to another hotel around a block away where we can have a room with two beds (a double and a single) that will be suitable for when I get the baby.

The staff was very friendly at Yellow House and being right across the street from a police station it was very safe (though I must say I've heard or read nothing about a crime problem here) but it was also across the street from a nearly all night karaoke bar it was very noisy. And the traffic is always noisy here.
This is the eating area at Yellow House. Every morning they served hot drinks, juice, one egg, a banana, and french bread. The winding stairway leads to the second floor--elevators are rare.
This is my mother's room on the second floor, directly above the entrance. My room was directly above hers and was the same layout with slightly different furniture.
The shower was not enclosed. The door to the bathroom was plastic and when it was shut the entire bathroom became the shower. This seems to be a common setup as the bathroom at Chau Doc was the same.
Directly across the street from Yellow House--the police station and Madame Cuc's Hotel. The police station is the white building. Right inside the window into what appeared to be a large meeting room a bust of Ho Chi Minh is visible. Madame Cuc's is reportedly where Michael Caine stayed while he was filming the remake of "The Quiet American". No doubt he stayed on the top floor which would be less noisy than the lower floors.

This is the entrace to the hotel we are in now, Bich Duyen. It actually turns out to be cheaper because we have a double. Breakfast is basically the same but you can't have the egg cooked anyway you like and there is just one baguette instead of three. Breakfast is served in wooden living room style furniture rather than cafe tables.
This is looking outside our room window, which again is right above the entrace (we ask for a second floor room so there aren't so many steps to climb). There are three rooms each on floors two through five and I think there are two rooms on the sixth floor and perhaps a room for the staff. It is very quiet because the hotel opens not onto a regular street but onto a pedestrian street. This setup is very common in Saigon--pedestrian alleys honeycomb the neighborhoods--soom are mostly residential and some are commercial like this one.
This is our room--a small double bed and a small single bed.
The bathroom is "American standard" with an enclosed shower.
The room has an air conditioner and the rotating wall fan. I think the rate is cheaper if you don't use the a/c but for now we are paying for it. Possibly after I get Henry we will forego it to try and prevent him from catching cold due to the sudden change in temperature.

I've been tagged!

I've been tagged by Sue and Gary, here are the rules:

You have to post these rules before you give the facts.
Players, you must list one fact that is somehow relevant to your life for each letter of your middle name.
If you don’t have a middle name, use the middle name you would have liked to have had.
When you are tagged, you need to write your own blog post containing your own middle name game facts.
At the end of your blog post, you need to choose one person for each letter of your middle name to tag.
Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged & to read your blog!
In a sort of family tradition I am called by my middle name, Scott:

S—Shakespeare, I’m working on a dissertation that is related to the work of Shakespeare though it deals primarily with an anonymous piece of literature. I’ve brought some reading material with me to Vietnam and I hope to finish it within a year or two.

C—Car, I like to spend time in my car. I commute 24 miles to work so spend at least an hour a day, listening to audio books or talk radio. If the weather permits I eat lunch in my car.

O—Order, I like things to be in order which is why the library profession suits me much better than the years I struggled through teaching high school. The library is quiet and everything has its proper place. Of course I know that will change in many ways after I bring Henry home, but I grew up with studious and fairly quiet parents so I think it can be a good thing.

T—Texas, I live in northeast Texas. I have lived numerous other places—went to undergraduate study in Utah and graduate study in Hawaii. But I always had my heart in Texas and was anxious to return whenever I was away. Now I get the chance to bring Henry back with me. As I posted in my blog before I left, it was hard to believe that the next time I see the farm he will be there too.

T—the text, I deal with texts all the time. In the library I am surrounded by texts and direct patrons to various texts as sources of information. In my doctoral studies I interpret and analyze texts. Texts are the artifacts that connect us to other people’s lives, experiences, and times. The internet is a great resource where the average person like me can create a text that can be very easily offered out to a large audience.

Now it's my turn to tag 4 people. If you've already been tagged (and most of you have already been, but you are a part of the small circle of people I am acquainted with in the adoption community online), You're already done!

Joe and Katie http://www.journey4babyben.blogspot.com/
Frank and Crystal http://www.babyfrances.blogspot.com/
Jon and DeanAnne http://www.thefordhamjourney.blogspot.com/
Julie http://www.lovefromvietnam.blogspot.com/

Visit to Mekong Delta, Part Three

On the evening of day two we arrived in Chau Doc near the Cambodian border. September 2nd and 3rd are both holidays so as we arrived by “luxury boat” there were much activity going on
We stayed in this fairly nice hotel—I had to pay four dollars to have a room to myself rather than a dormitory. I didn’t pay the five dollars extra for air conditioning. The way the hotels are set up, the a/c is run by a remote control and you don’t get it unless you pay extra. It was a little warmer than I thought it would be. Rather than the wall mounted fans I had grown accustomed to this room had a ceiling fan which really didn’t seem to create much of a breeze. I also did not have a window to open, just a door opening out on a balcony which wrapped around the building and was therefore accessible to other rooms. I just laid on the bed without even unfolding the green terry cloth coverlet and fell immediately asleep, while the rest of the tour group prowled the city and found various places to eat.
When we awoke the next morning we had breakfast (which cost extra) on the roof of the hotel. There was a pleasant view of the area, and I saw that most of the building had television antennas coming off their roofs.

We took the bus to the so-called Cave Pagoda—up a very long flight of stone stairs. At the top I took a photo of the surrounding rice fields and across the river you can see over into Cambodia. But photos were not allowed in the Buddhist pagoda itself. We made our way into the pagoda and through it into a small cave with two large ceramic snakes. The legend was that a woman was set aside by her husband after three years of marriage due to no children being born. She was upset and set up the shrine in the cavern, and she was attended by two snakes who were people by night and snakes by day.
We then went back to the main boat pier and got into small boats rowed by women. The woman rowing my boat had a two year old girl who sat with us. We winded our way through a floating village—people who are too poor to afford to buy land but can set up housekeeping on a boat. Periodically we had to duck our heads to miss the low power lines running from shore to the boats. As always children waved and pranced whenever they saw us.

Our boat ride took us to a mosque—the local Cham people are Muslim. We then made our way back to the “luxury boat” we had ridden the previous day. The boat allowed us to sit on the roof if we wanted, and I got somebody to take a photo of myself. The last photo I took was what I imagined to be a typical farm for the area.

From here we made our way back via boat and bus to Saigon, arriving a little before 6 PM.

Visit to the Mekong Delta, Part Two

On the night before we had arrived in Can Tho and everyone else checked into a hotel. But I was told someone would soon arrive to take me to the home stay. Imagine my surprise when a small boy of around 20 showed up in his motorbike ready to take me and my luggage to his uncle’s boat. What could I do but get on since I didn’t now have a room at the hotel? He put my big backpack in between his legs and I had my daypack on my back and away we went, zooming through traffic, around corners, over bridges. I didn’t know where to hang on and ended up clutching the seat beneath me and pinioning my legs against the motorbike like I was riding a horse. It can’t have been as dangerous as I imagined—I have seen people carrying televisions on motorbikes, young children riding behind parents, I even saw a girl riding as a passenger on a motorbike while she carried a tray with two bowls of soup on it.

Through a couple of alleys and soon we arrived at a boat captained by the uncle and with four other people waiting—a couple from Spain and two men from Holland. It was completely dark by this time and we made our way down the river for at least thirty minutes to the ultra rural bungalow that he has set up. After we checked into our rooms the family served us a meal in an outdoor eating area. We ate elephant ear fish that we made into a kind of sandwich with clear rice paper and various vegetables. The host and his wife’s uncle than sat with us for a long time and told us about life in the village and various customs. The first two photos show the bungalow rooms and my bed, which was surrounded by a mosquito net. It was a fairly pleasant place to stay and was not hot at all. But I had some crackers that were eaten by some kind of animal in the night because I did not have them closed up in my backpack.

I didn’t get much sleep at the bungalow—first of all I felt obliged to stay up as long as the rest of the group did and that was until around ten o’clock, at which time I was practically falling asleep at the table. Then the next morning the noisy boats began moving up and down the river at 3 or 4 o’clock.

We left the bungalow on foot at 6:15 and we were taken by another nephew to the open market. This travel involved going across the river on a small ferry that could hold around six people at a time. In the market women sold vegetables as well as frogs, snakes, turtles, fish, crabs, and other water animals—all of which appeared to still be alive and wriggling around in the bowl or basket in which they were offered for sale.

We left the bungalow at 7 and I had lots of time to kill walking around the market with the same nephew who had taken me by motorbike to the boat the night before. When finally I reconnected with the rest of my tour companions who had stayed in the hotel I had to wade into the river because the boat couldn’t pull up close enough. The sixth picture shows the nephew waving at me as the boat pulled away.

I enjoyed the home stay, and it was certainly interesting to see a Vietnamese family close up. We ate amongst eight members of one family. But it put me out of sync with the rest of the tour—I had to schlep my large bag for the rest of the day whereas the others put their bags in the bus that morning.


The boat carried us around the very interesting floating market. People sold all sorts of things from their boats. The first photo shows a man who sold drinks to the tourists. Then there was a woman who sold bowls of pho—but she had to wait around for you to finish so you could return the bowl. Most interesting were the man and woman on a large boat who carved pineapples into a sort of lollipop for tourists to buy.
The next photo shows a man carrying several heads of cabbage from a big boat to his smaller boat. This is how business was transacted—smaller boats gathered around larger boats.
When we got off the boat we went to a noodle making factory. Rice is mixed with tapioca in large pots and cooked into a thick soup. It is then poured out onto screens and left to dry in the sun, after which it is cut into noodles.


In the next photo a single boat carries over two dozen large bags of rice. A single man hoisted the bags one at a time onto his shoulder and carried them somewhere and returnd a few minutes later for another bag.
We passed many shanties like the one in the next photo, and children always waved and yelled “hello” at us. Everyone was very friendly and didn’t seem to mind us taking their photographs. Many times children did elaborate dives into the water to impress us.
The boat next arrived at Thanh rice factory. In the first photo the contraption that sucks the rice out of the boats into the building is seen. The next photo shows a machine that shakes the rice, followed by a photo showing rice being funneled into a bag. Finally there is a photo of the interior of the factory with hundreds of bags of rice. Outside the factory as we waited for the boat to take us away we bought rice pancakes filled with coconut from a man that is seen in the next photo.


The boat returned us to town and I think the hotel people returned to the hotel to rest and collect their belongings—but I was obliged to sit for almost three hours at the restaurant where we had been taken for lunch. I could have walked around the city and there was a park across the street I wanted to see (it had a huge statue of Ho Chi Minh in it) but I was tired and had both my bags and at any rate I was sitting on the balcony of the restaurant that afforded me a wonderful view of the flowing traffic below, so I just stayed where I was. I had pumpkin flower soup, pictured in the blue bowl. I also have photos of a couple of the people I observed—a man with his two children on a motorbike (he was waiting for his wife, soon she came out and crammed onto the motorbike and all four zoomed away) and a man carrying a large box. I had just seen a man carrying two televisions on the back of a motorbike but I wasn’t quick enough with my camera to catch that.


Finally around 3 the bus came to get me at the restaurant. I was afraid that he would have forgotten about me since everyone else was at the hotel and I didn’t know where the hotel was. I was with a different group of people throughout the entire tour—one group would mix with another for a few hours and then part of the group would be divided off and move on.

Visit to the Mekong Delta, Part One

Still no word from the agency to verify but I think my paperwork was certified last Friday. I heard from another family with my agency that they were told they were certified and I have been told that I am on the same timeline as them, so I can just hope that it is true for me as well.
In the meantime, last Friday after my mother cancelled going to Danang and Hoi An I booked a tour to the Mekong Delta that lasted three days and two nights. I was anxious to see rural life outside of the big city of Saigon. These tours book from every hotel in the area, but they all seem to be run by one tour company. It is very cheap—the main cost was twenty eight dollars which included the bus, boats, and two night’s stay in a hotel. I paid ten dollars extra for a “home stay” the first night, and two dollars extra because the 2nd and 3rd are holidays.

A representative from the tour bus came to my hotel to get me at 7:20 AM. There were about four buses lined up a block or so away and she lead me past the many street vendors to my bus. Not long after we left Saigon the bus stopped for gas. I noticed several truck drivers pulled in around the gas station with hammocks slung under the back corner of the truck to catch a nap, as seen in my first photo.
The next photo shows the boats we caught at My Tho for a fairly quick jaunt around what appeared to be mostly fishing operations. We took lunch in a kind of resort restaurant—the third photo shows the fruits that were offered to us to eat. While we ate a group of men played various string instruments while women and girls danced. I ate spring rolls and we had about two hours on what I think was a small island. There were bicycles available to explore but I took one of the hammocks that were also offered to us and fell asleep. When we left we were paddled two in a boat to the bus.

When we got off the boat we arrived at a coconut candy making factory, I took photos of the various steps. First the coconut is shredded by a machine into a large blue bowl. Second the shredded coconut is pressed and the juice is extracted into a metal bowl. Then the juice is heated with what I think was rice powder and sugar and made into a sticky taffy like substance. This is then poured out onto a slick surface, rolled and cut into strips, then each strip is cut into squares, wrapped first in edible rice paper and then in regular paper, and inserted into a bag with a label with the name of the factory, Phong Phu.

The last photo shows the ferry that we took to Ben Tre. When we approached the ferry everyone had to get out of the bus and walk into an area with pedestrians and motorbikes. As the vehicles started moving onto the ferry a gate was opened and pedestrians and motorbikes made a mad rush onboard—motorbikes took the areas in between vehicles and pedestrians walked up steep narrow steps to a small area on either side of the central space.