Parks I've known

I've been searching for a big park like Prospect Park. It's not here.

My favorite so far is park #1. It's tiny, though there is some green around the Independence Palace. There are a lot of fruiting and flowering trees but not much access to water and no understory--so its pretty lucky for having even just a few birds.

Park #2 has the concrete-rimmed lake and the shuttlecock fields. Awful for birds.

#3 is the zoo--best birds so far. And its pretty lush. But its far and you pay to get in.

I don't think I mentioned #5 yet--a strange mix of derelict kiddie rides, running tracks, and one day they had a huge outdoor book sale.

So I went nuts and went way past the zoo looking for another green spot on the map.

It wasn't easy to spot--even the guards at the entrance didn't know where they were on the map. But they let me park my bike and stroll on in. So now I'm passing resort-style huts with made-to-look-quaint fake shrimp traps on a nice estuary wondering where the hell I am.

And now I'm REALLY wondering where the hell I am.

And now I'm through another gate that says "reception." Here are some water-puppet style sculptures. I figured this is a good time to turn back. Now I'm thinking of what I would do if uniformed thugs started plodding after me, but in Vietnam one doesn't have the same sense of KEEP OUT that you have in America. Once home, Jenny confirmed that I wasn't in a park at all, but a nice little resort.

I took some binocular photos on the way out. This quick little guy is a Pied Fantail.

The reptiles were pretty plentiful here. I found a large skink, sans tail, and there were some well-camouflaged spiny lizards

In the end, I went back to my favorite park. It's not so pretty, but they try.

This is a "mural" made with different colors of moss. In real life it's crap--metal tube framing surrounded by lackluster landscaping. But if you didn't know that, you'd appreciate it more.

Vietamese squirrels. More interesting than ours. Haha, everyone was laughing at the white guy taking pictures of common squirrels! Actually, no, they weren't--with photography, nothing is taboo here.

Non Vietnamese Food is pretty good too

Thai food is really good in the States, but in Vietnam it is closer to home and therefore more authentic. So there may be some odd stuff on the menu, like raw shrimp fried rice and raw crab claws. There seems to be 3 types: expensive (which is odd, because even in NYC the best Thai food is cheap), midrange and super ridiculously cheap. And except for differences in presentation, it is all uniformly awesome.

Whole snapper at a mid-range place.

A high-end Thai restaurant at a friend's birthday party. The green curry was much milder than in the states--which is to say it was edible. Pineapple fried rice is nice everywhere, but here they had it served the pineapple.


Fried catfish and fried rice at the cheap-o place. For a few bucks, It was really excellent, comparable to more expensive Thai food. Desert was coconut/ taro custard delicately wrapped in a palm leaf. Another nice thing about restaurants here is you can often get a semi-private booth, Japan style.

Vietnam: What's not to love?

mealworms.

Here's the most amazing knockoff I've ever seen:
The box is beautiful. But a closer look has me completely stunned--the view inside the box is so at odds with the outside that the brain shuts down. Now, I've heard of getting away with copying by changing a word or two, but "Transformers: Revenge of the _allen" is pushing it. Inside is a toy that would shame a happy meal. It looks like it was whittled from a plastic egg carton, and even though it's sealed inside it is filthy. I can sort of relate--every time I gifted someone a Transformer I'd open it, play with it, and try to tape it back in the package, but at least I'd brush it off first.

A boring place for weathermen

Really frigging hot and lots of sun. I almost made a fake weather widget in my sidebar that never changes. But we had a rainstorm at night. It is really refreshing, after needing 3 cold showers a day, to get rained on. Though one day it will start raining and won't stop for months--can't imagine now.

Afternoon Adventure

Today I took a long bike ride to a park I found on a map--a nice square of green with a blue lake. I always assume that these green areas are places left alone, but in Asia they are simply developed areas without buildings.

This one had plenty of sculpture things:

Including ones in the "soul-less commie" style:

There was some nature. Here's a squeeky chipmunk.

I love seeing Mickey out of his element.



The lake was very artificial, with the steep concrete banks that Asians seem to love and birds don't. This one was teeming with fish, but amazingly no herons or kingfishers. Very odd.


Also, like other parks, they had devices half playground-ride, half Crunch Gym, and half torture-device, many rusted shut.


This one looks exquisitely painful.

Again with the derelict, rusted mini-roller coasters

People mostly come in two sorts: the uniformed school kids kicking around a shuttle-cock, and surly, big-bellied folk playing some sort of bocci ball. No birds except the poor caged pets.

Anyway, I got the hell out of there and came back to my favorite park for some binocular photos.

Here I found another life-bird--the Vinous Bellied Starling--which always makes the day worthwhile. And a Brown Shrike, seen before in Cambodia. You may notice the slightly better photo quality--I discovered that my camera perfectly fits the eyepiece of my cheap compact binoculars, while my more expensive mid-range binoculars, bought for that purpose, kinda suck. With a lifetime warranty. If it doesn't work when its not broke, the warranty is superfluous.

The zoo, my second time around

The Saigon Zoo is awesome. The animal habitats range from fair to good--definitely better than the San Diego Zoo fifteen years ago. Here's a hippo getting fatter:


Elephants never look happy in captivity. But for a dollar you can feed them sugarcane and vegetables. That trunk is pretty far reaching. Male elephants(right) don't play nice with others, so they have sucky treatment.


Rhinos aren't very entertaining in 45 degree heat.


Here's a Sloth Bear. Maybe you can figure out how it got its name.


The beautiful and highly deadly Cassowary from Australia. Its inner toe is a straight 5 inch dagger with the hurting and the poking and the ouchie.


Mom and Pop in front of the floral clock. At this minute, it actually had good time.


Here's a Vietnamese bird called an Adjutant that reminds me of Grandpa. Many storks here were injured, which is probably how they ended up here. It's a good practice--gives them a happy retirement.


There are a lot of wild birds here. Many fruit trees, free animal feed, and some undergrowth makes this a bird hotspot, with plenty of opportunities for bad binocular photos. Here's a Black-lored Oriole and a Collared Kingfisher, which is common but a life-bird for me.


Aw, Dad really got into bird watching. So cute!


This long-horn behemoth was the highlight of my whole trip so far (besides Jenny, of course). It was right on the sidewalk, ambling fearlessly. I've been wondering where all those awesome, trophy-worthy bugs are. Now I feel like I'm someplace exciting.


This is actually where I found the beetle. There are loads of these kiddie parks all over Vietnam, derelict-looking during the day and lit up at night.


Here's the adjacent history museum. a few cents for locals, two dollars for foreigners. Sometimes it makes sense, other times it nettles me. The museum itself wasn't too impressive. Its highlights were little diaramas of red figures killing blue figures, the former Vietnamese and the latter Chams, Mongols, Chinese, Siamese, or French Colonists, all successfully ousted from Vietnam. Oh, and the constant twitter of bats and swifts roosting in the rafters was pretty cool.


Here's us three. Apparently its bad luck for three people to be in the same photo, so we took turns. In front of this...thing.

A better mouse trap is no trap at all.

Vietnamese are incredibly resourceful and inventive. So I wasn't surprised to see these home-made barriers. I just didn't know what they were for.


Eventually, I discovered that mice would sneak in and run across Jenny's parents while they slept. They put a lot of time and worry into these barriers (the one downstairs is made from cardboard boxes and 2 X 4s painstakingly wrapped with the all purpose plastic tape) but they are absolutely 100% ineffective. Mice can jump well over 4 feet and can creep through the most negligible cracks, and whatever a mouse can do, a rat can do better.


Today at the supermarket I passed by this device--an electric ultrasound mouse-be-gone, and I couldn't resist taking it home.


I was sure the parents would stick by tradition and scoff at the idea, but they were ecstatic. I plugged it in straight-a-way. Don't know if it works, but the barriers are gone, and no one complains.

Let's play a game:

"What will the white boy put in his mouth?"

Jenny loves the good life, but she'll go slumming with me at a local "restaurant" so I can adapt to unclean food. Here we're in a little shack eating beef wrapped in some sort of leaf which we wrap in Another leaf with pickles, mint, greens, and dip in the ubiquitous nuoc mam. Very yummy. Jenny has been very clever acclimating me to the local microbes--I didn't even notice when I started taking ice in my drinks. We also ate at a local "restaurant" (a cart serving homemade dumplings to people on little plastic stools) in Chinatown, squatting in front of the Chinese social center. Also very good. 2 kinds of dun tart, Dad!


No cooties in this: the most ice cream-like yogurt you can douse in little m%m's, fruit, jellied marshmallows, cookies, cereal, sprinkles, and a popular edible-rock chocolate at Pinkspoon, which one of Jenny's friends owns--or something. Right off the cinema and my favorite park.