Forgotton photo #5

Riding behind a portable greenhouse.

A Chocolate Bun Too Far.

Trying to sneak a snack upstairs and I fail. Junk food is hard to get enough as it is--trying to consume it away from Mom's prying eyes is futile. Will have to resort to the sad practice of eating in the bathroom.

The High Bandwidth Art Museum Blog

Rode my way to the Museum of Art. Here's my bike--I'm so proud.
It has been said that the best thing about this museum is the building itself, which is probably true:

Front


Back


Opposite the Courtyard

I'm ashamed to say I didn't even realize I'd been walking on a tennis court inside the courtyard. Then some kids came and put up soccer goals. Very interesting--makes me think the building is French, which I could find out with a simple google search (or better yet, you can find out with a simple google search.)

Very nice stained glass work throughout.


And nice tile-work on the balconies.


Alexander Calder eat your clown nose out!


I like this--a cross between Short Circuit and Judge Dredd.

And yes, there is some art inside. Mercifully, not everything was war-related.


Both of these have negative space around the heart. Wonder if that is Vietnamese symbology?

The title of this sculpture struck me as really neat.


I think this one is about SCUBA.


This one keeps me up at night.


Chagall's Asian counterpart.

If it weren't for Uncle Ho in the middle, I'd think this was a Latin piece. The ethnic people have really colorful garb--hope to see them one day.

These Two were neat. The longer I look, the more repeating patterns I find.

An interesting pose.

A guy with lots on his mind.

Look, I've got an Eastern ancestor!

Don't mess with this guy when he's drunk.

This is a really neat piece--"Spirit", though it was placed in an awful spot--needs a plain backdrop to be appreciated.

Here's some contemporary Vietnamese art. It is for sale in a gallery downstairs, though you can get stuff like this cheap in the back alleys of Hoi An. With the bright colors and heavy paint daubs, maybe you can say its not fine art, just gaudy technique. But I really like it--the sort of things I'd want in my house.




This one is interesting for its shocking realism--this is exactly what back alleys look like.


I'm sure I've seen paintings like these in big, modern hotels. Strange about the ears--it seems that most Vietnamese women have really tiny ears, often with cute elf tips.

I like this one for its faery-like qualities.


The title of this one could be "So that's what we Vietnamese were fighting for?"

I love these--sculptures of other artists and writers that the sculptor probably didn't like none too much.

Goddess of the moon, god of the sun, and OMG Dog!

And with this last picture, someone from the museum asked me not to take photos. Which is really too bad--I missed my camera after that. But that just says how good a museum it is.

Banh Mi: The Other Pho

Back Home, Banh Mi (bun me) is all the rage. It's also as Americanized as egg foo young. Some nice sweet pickled radish and carrot, a slab of gristly pork or chicken (or my favorite, boiled chicken), hold the pate please.


Not like here at all. It's usually made from a tiny portable sandwich shop (or a barrel) on the street, but it's a complicated affair with many ingredients. There seems to be some order to how it's constructed, but no part of the sandwich is the same. On one side you may have a processed pork product, followed by some fatty thing or lard paste, a cucumber and bland/ briny radish in the center, and then some deep raspberry-colored pate. Some parts are actually tasty, but they are all strange to Western tongues. Each bite is like uncomfortably settling into a cold bath, followed by a feeling of relief that it's over.

The Hazards of Eating Out

We're having grilled pork and rice just 2 feet from a really super messy, loud and sloppy pavement job. The food was good, especially for about $2 a head.

Failures are an important part of eating out. It is very important to learn what not to eat. Almost everything here is excellent, though last night's meal was a bust. We had a plateful of the kind of invasive snails we get in Prospect Park. I pried open one, make a grim meal of it, washed it down with some juice. Then I had ANOTHER. Why? Because it was the last one I'll ever eat.

The Curious Case of the Biker at Night-time

So, it's after midnight and you hear an authoritative woman's voice repeating something over a loudspeaker. Looking out of your posh 4 star hotel you see it's coming from a rigged speaker on a bicycle. Now your old fears come creeping in: political propoganda? Curfew? A one-person protest? In any case, your trip in Vietnam will never be the same.

Actually, it's someone selling these things: rice jello filled with minced pork and a hard-boiled quail egg wrapped in a banana leaf. It's some sort of midnight snack, though we sometimes have them for breakfast. It's just one of those odd Vietnamese things. Sure, we have a curfew--about an hour after 3am the motorcycle roar dies down a little.

I just can't resist cute cookies. It always boggles me that a country with a population only twice that of NYC has its own language, its own food packaging, Coke cans, Family Feud and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire (what does that even mean? a million dong? who isn't?).

A Minnow in a School of Anchovies

I wish I was a writer or a poet. Something really needs to be said about Saigon traffic that hasn't been said already, even if it's just a list of "driving rules." I'm hoping to make a helmet cam to do my talking for me, but first I have to find a place that sells washers and screws (I can't find anything here without explicit guidance).
Anyway, I had a shock in my adult English class--a survey on motorcycles vs bicycles came out 50-50. Very at odds with the ratio you find on the street.

So here she is. The top of the line roadster-type bike. I think it was 1.5 million dong, which is roughly $90. Aluminum Frame. One gear. Basket is very handy. A comfy seat for Jenny in the back and foot rests. Pedal-powered headlight. A nifty built-in lock for the back wheel (so why not shoulder the whole bike and ride away on your motorcycle? I'm sure it's been done). Lots and lots of extra crap--mud gutters, metal rims around the tires, chain housing, deluxe kickstand--that I was about to strip, but from the first day I rode it home I decided I'll take every extra metal and plastic bit for protection.

In heavy traffic (which totals half the day) the bike easily keeps up with motorcycles, squeezes with the crowd easier, has less inertia (in traffic everyone has to scoot with their legs anyway). I'm now riding Jenny on her scooter, but given the choice I'll always choose the bike.

Crustaceans I have known

It's interesting how many types of shrimpiness there are. We all know the delicious tail meat, hopefully shucked and de-veined before cooking. Here, we get shrimp, the whole shrimp, and nothing but the shrimp. Boiled completely whole in its b-day suit.

The Vietnamese way is to nibble off bits of shell, gleam some meat and deposit the hard parts. Not fond of that technique. It's annoying, and I notice they don't get all the meat and probably swallow some shell. So I spend some messy moments shucking the shell first, fully soiling my hands, and then eat the tail meat.

But it doesn't end with the tail. You have to open the carapace and to terrible things with the stuff inside. On these large prawns, It wasn't so bad, as I got away with discarding the gills and eating just the head meat, which is very delicate tasting and oyster-ey. Finally, the legs are holding thousands of tiny purple shrimp caviar. On the regular size shrimp, these had an extremely light shrimpy taste and were a bit sweet--very pleasant. The larger the shrimp the yuckier they taste, and the prawn shown above is as big as they get.

And then there is the dreaded tiny dried shrimp that goes in the vegetable soup sometimes. Awful--just awful. Purely concentated shrimp taste that will kick your tonsils. Not dissimilar from the dried shrimp powder that goes on crackers and chips, god knows why.

In conclusion, white folk everywhere stop at the tail, and they're not missing much.

HCM Museum: Cameras, Not Clues

It is quite a bike to the HCM Museum, and a scary one. The scenery is a kaleidoscope of heavy highway traffic and slums by the canal. During a huge segway (going over a large bridge and having to turn around and re-cross it) I passed by the Majestic Hotel, where my mother and I spent last New Years.

Tucked away in the filthy Saigon Harbor, the Ho Chi Minh Museum is quite an attractive building.

I don't know who this is, but he's a big commie.

He's now cursed with an eternal view of Vietnam's progress.

The snack bar has a tree growing out if it!

A neat vase

Here's the big man himself. Communist sculpture is so prevalent, and so awful. This guy can dance the robot and that's about it.

And here is his dumbell set.

HCM, always ready to put out fires.

This Museum had some pretty heavy communist rhetoric, even more so than the war museum, with phrases like "teaching to erraticating the illiteracy," with a photo of HCM himself teaching a classroom. It's all true--the French colonists certainly didn't want their slaves to read and write. I'm just saying the rhetoric is heavy. The highlight of my trip was talking to a high school kid about what American History teaches about Ho Chi Minh. Which is not a whole lot. If you want to end a conversation with a right wing vet, just say "Pentagon Papers." Because there is the ugly, in your face reason for the war. And also because your right winger will have no idea what "Pentagon Papers" means.

Here's Ho Chi Minh's possible plan to "abolish the hunger" with macaroni and bean pictures.

For the most accurate commentary, I always go to the kids. Here's Ho Chi Minh playing pokemon with the children in the park (sign says "age 3")

HCM playing real life chess fun!

I thought this saying was very touching. Though even now there is great prejudice between North and South Vietnamese, and Southerners are not fond of visiting Hanoi.

Clockwork HCM reading Lenin! I was hoping it moves on the hour--waited for a while and then gave up.

If this don't make you wave a little flag, what will?

Alien baby loves airstrikes! Yay!!

This is a relief of Angkor Wat. Shortly after the Nixon War, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and ousted the murderous Khmer Rouge, apparently to retaliate for ethnic cleansing in Cambodia. Now Cambodia owes them big.

These are adorable dioramas of temples set up in honor of Ho Chi Minh.
You might think its a god complex, but it's part of the Confucian way of honoring one's ancestors.

Can't say I learned a lot from this museum, but the basic story is Ho Chi Minh grew up while the French colonized Vietnam and pretty much enslaved the whole population plantation-style. He somehow got to travel around Europe and learned about Communism in France of all places. Made sense to him--Vietnamese were poor farmers enslaved by an imperialistic elite, so Communism was the obvious answer (many countries turned to worse governments in answer to imperialism, especially from the US--from African Countries to the Middle East, North Korea and Myanmar). Then he came back to Vietnam and they filmed Full Metal Jacket.

Today, it seems every Government starts out different and turns out the same. Communism in Vietnam is in the power of the Government and devoid in its economic growth--almost exactly like the US. While the ratio is still in favor of the poor, a few people get really, really stinking rich in Vietnam, and the industrialization they're working for will bring the class issues we all know well. Healthcare is NOT socialized--hospital prices are cheap, but that will change real soon thanks to growing insurance companies.

I'll save the rest of the commentary until I hear the Truth from John Stewart.