Bargaining

I was sitting on a tiny plastic stool on a busy corner of Dam market, just off the main drag in the coastal city of Nha Trang. As the stall’s owner moved to hand me another plate of food, I waved my hands. “Oh, no, thank you; very full,” I said, patting my stomach.

We had just polished off four rounds of what I can only describe as squid omelet: A couple hunks of nautical head-piece and tentacles chopped up and fried on a hot griddle. A thin mixture of egg and bean sprout join the picture, twirling on the searing black metal for thirty seconds before two quick flips and the tiny omelet lands next to its twin on a plastic plate.

This is served with a small garden of greens – lettuces and mints and basils and cilantros, as well as a fiery chili-garlic dipping sauce. Delicious, cheap, very alien street food.

We moved to pay, asking “How much?”

She points to both of us, “Foty Touszand Vietnamdong.”

A dollar each for four squid omelets, a steal in any country. We reach into our wallets. Zane pulls out a twenty K note, and she takes his half of the bill with a smile, two hands outstretched. I fumble through my wallet, a collection of huge, 500,000 notes and nearly worthless, pulpy 1 and 2 thousands. I find a ten, and hand it over, ready to count up a bunch of twos and make up the difference.

“Its fine,” she smiles, holds up the total 30,000 dong, and goes back to tending her sizzling squid.

In that singular nonchalant instant, she revealed to us that we had, for lack of any other term, been had. Willingly. “She just admitted to having us,” I vocalized with incredulity.

Bargaining has become the defining facet of my day-to-day life. To feel like you aren’t getting ripped off at every turn you need to engage in a seriously long back and forth to reach a deal that can even be considered legitimate. And even then, you know the locals are getting it at half the price.

In Vietnam, the going wisdom among tourists is that the first price a local quotes a foreigner is generally about 5 times the going rate. With that figure in mind and a (very necessary) smile on my face – after all, the whole back and forth is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of humor – I can pretty reliably get what I think is a fair price.

The thing is, when it comes to food, it’s an entirely different story. Generally there is no upmarking the price when it comes to street stalls. I don’t know if it’s because the motherly pot-stirrers have some inner desire to see everyone well fed, but the plastic stool on the sidewalk is, above all things, fair. You wait your turn; everyone gets the same thing and the price is an acknowledged standard. It’s comforting to know that in a country with such a rich tradition of food, as long as I don’t develop a new penchant for buying lacquered antiques on the street, I should be OK money-wise.

But for now this maker of delicious seafood omelets has thrown all of that in doubt. 

Recipe for Awesomeness #1

Recipe for Awesomeness # 1

10-23-11

You will need: 

2 eggs

handful of parsley and chives and/or scallions

1 baguette - good - crispy outside, airy and soft inside - not too big - maybe 9 inches

oil

sliced garlic and chilis pickled in white vinegar

sriracha (or any chili sauce)

lime

S&P

Directions:

1. Beat eggs and greens together + salt & pepper, in a bowl. Heat oil in a small sautee pan (high heat) and put the egg mixture in. It should cover the bottom of the pan and have a little bit of depth to it - not much - maybe half an inch up the sides.

2. After the eggs have soldified a bit, browned around the edges, flip.

3. When the entire circle of egg is done - firm and browned and smelling delicious, remove. Cut into 1”x1” pieces. 

4. Leave the excess oil in the pan. Use to toast baguette, flattening it, squishing and crunching its exterior a bit if you have to in order to get it to fit. Once lightly toasted and oil is mostly absorbed, cut into small pieces. 

5. For dipping sauce: 

Salt, sugar, a spoonful chilis and garlic slices and accompanying pickle liquid. juice of one small lime. squirt of chili sauce. 

dip egg in sauce. eat. enjoy. invent ways to use the now tasty bread. 

Moving

Moving.

My life is a 2-foot by 1.5-foot by 4-foot pillar of air. Everything is here. Water, food, they lay at my feet. The Bag of Important Things is lodged between my left clave and the outer wall. I am bent forward, my head rests against the thankfully cushioned back of the chair in front of mine. Its pillar-space-owner is a Vietnamese woman. She is demure and sits next to her husband. He smells like Asian B.O.

Headphones in my ears – I am reluctant ot remove them, to bear the vibrations and tones of six different languages streaking through the air all around me, seeking an embrace from a friendly listener. That is not me. A book on my lap; my stare is directed downwards, I am drawn out of this world. For the next six hours I will exist not in this hamster cage, but in the rich texture of fiction.

My bladder is already burning, sloshing against my innards with every kidney-reorienting jolt of the road.

And now, NOW! when the hugely relative term ‘comfort’ has been achieved – a stasis into which I can reduce and condense my very selfhood to these preset borders of space – NOW this Vietnamese woman – who must be wealthy enough to ride a bus filled with westerners but not very wealthy enough to own a car, thus falling into the rarified group of Vietnamese middle class, with all the authority and prestige and immunity that label allows her to self-bestow with respect to the lesser, the more, the ones without – NOW this wife of the smelly man is attempting to recline.

She is throwing her weight against her chair, as if somehow she will shatter the thing blocking its passage: my patella. Which is attached firmly, with ligaments, tendons, cartilage bumpers, to my femur – itself immovable from its pelvic home, which is wedged into the furthest recess of the dark crevasse where my two concave cushions meet.

She is throwing her self with such vigor that I’m sure I’ll break, or at least bend – squashing my legs together in diagonal defeat. She is expending her life box, and diminishing mine. My LIFE. She is taking it and making it hers through some sort of aggressive transferal process I am no good at.

Is there a law of conservation of life space?

God help me this was the chartered bus. 

Mountain Town

If I lived in Vietnam, it’d be in Dalat. A city of hills and winding streets, it looks as though it belongs somewhere in the San Francisco Bay Area, rather than the Central Highlands of Vietnam. The air is mountain-fresh and seasoned by the surrounding pine forests. Their fallen needles scatter across the ground, and when the wind blows across the sharp blue lake and the atmosphere all around you is crisp and open and you can breathe it deep into your lungs, through your stomach, it is pure. It smells like fall and feels like home.

 

The people have pride in their unique city and countryside. Instead of the ubiquitous rice paddies found in the rest of Vietnam, farms here grow grapes, strawberries, and above all, flowers. “Dalat: City of 1000 Flowers,” it is sometimes called. Groves of 8-foot tall sunflowers sprout on the side of every road. 

 

In the morning I step out onto my balcony into a city’s symphony: the low rumbling percussion of motorbike mufflers, the sequestered cacophony of the brass car horns in every stage of disrepair. A mélange of voices asks about price, weight, return familiarities. Once in a while, an overdriven loudspeaker hooked up to a car battery turns a solitary motorbike man into a star soloist.

And I get to look out at this beautiful city of pastel blocks.

 

This is supposed to be a city for romance. Which makes it a prime destination for Vietnamese traveling couples. They stroll together, hand in hand, through the night market. They sit on benches, limbs twisted into knots, for hours, breathing as one, looking into the night sky – stars they can see without the smog of the city. Girls giggle; boys give them flowers. And white people are few and far between.

Things you can do in Dalat.

(Formerly Titled: The Real Reasons I Would Move to Dalat)

Canyoning

Hiking

Bike Rides through country that looks like this

Rock Climbing

Waterfalls

 

This is an outdoorsman’s paradise in Vietnam. Local guides called “Easy Riders” will take you to the hot spots for a small price. But finding them yourself is exponentially more rewarding.

Lang Biang is a five-peak volcanic ridge that rises over Dalat like a parent. And, indeed, the city holds the mountain in exceptionally high praise. It’s a four-hour hike to the highest peak from the ethnic-minority village of Lat, where the locals till the hillside in parabolas around the enormous mountain.

Semi-wild horses patrol the slopes. Ponies, actually, sure-footed through the slippery needle-strewn pine forest. Here the trees reach proper heights. Towards the base they are smaller, Asian approximations of the giants we have in America – weird, squat things with arms growing out at all the wrong angles.

But up higher, near the peak, behemoths regularly rise over 100 feet. Where they have succumbed to gravity, a lance of destruction down the mountain can be seen. Red matchsticks mark the places once guarded by this land’s sentinels. These clearings however, give room for some of the most beautiful panoramas of the Vietnamese highlands.

 

When you find a place like this, it’s easy to want to live in the shadow of the mountain. 

Nha Trang

Nha Trang is basically the Cancun of Vietnam, or so I was led to believe. In a country so thin, the travelers’ journey from one end to another invariably touches down at all the “requisite” stops. It’s hard to get off that beaten tourist track.

The built up beachfront of Nha Trang looks like Tel Aviv with palm trees. High rise hotels with recognizable commercial names like Sheraton and Hilton loom over the stretch of Duong Tran Phu Road that jets along the contours of the sandy beach. Their steel and concrete shadows darken the stretch in the afternoon, announcing their prominence and prestige in a city where the new Vietnamese middle class comes to vacation.

The local partiers generally stick to the north side of town, around the bend of the Cai River where it flows into the South China Sea.

The white people end up collecting in a small pool of streets that have cropped up around the magnum opus of foreigner party spots: The Sailing Club, an institution that has held gravitational sway in Nha Trang ever since Vietnam opened its doors to the outside world in 1993.

In the nearby 3 x 3 grid of neon-lit streets, promoters stand outside their clubs, offering pamphlets listing happy hour specials from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. Restaurants with menus all in English serve pizza and chicken cordon bleu. Bars seem single-mindedly dedicated to plying white people with enough hard liquor to start small orgies gyrating to the beat of the Billboard Top 40.

I hate this scene, surrounded by Europeans as far from their home as I am from mine. This is not why I travel. This is the first in my three weeks in Vietnam that I have found myself so cut off from any pulse of local life and flavor. Every woman tries to sell you something and every motobike driver tries to rip you off in a drug deal.

The tourist industry has Nha Trang by the balls, and has clearly brought the city a lot of money. Growing up in a beachy tourist town, I have a natural aversion and understanding towards this culture of impermanent dwellers and spenders.

But here I’ve found it hardest to connect with the locals. It feels like I’m being squeezed by economy and geography to spend the night at foreign bars surrounded by people that speak English. It’s reminded me just how weird some travelers are. 

Case # 1: The sexpat.

Lars is a 42-year-old Los Angeles native. He left the States on, “…a trip around the world,” before settling in Finland, where he’s spent the last twelve years doing internet marketing for an extreme sports company called Fuktor.

“How does anyone end up anywhere,” he explained, “a beautiful blond woman with big tits and green eyes.”

Lars is spending his euro-style five week paid vacation to drink his way across Southeast Asia. “I’m kind of stuck back in Finland. I’ve got a daughter now,” he shrugs. This trip, for him, is a kind of self-medication.

He is tall and tan and his permanently shaved head is a bleached desert of UV inflicted coloration. His middle aged body holds the physique of someone with half his years, a T-shirt is pulled tight over his broad chest and rounded shoulders. A life of extremes: sports, partying traveling, hating, has both built him up and broken him down.

Behind his rimless Ray Bans, Lars’s eyes are glazed and furtive, darting faster than his words can catch up. His voice is tinged with the twangy slur of a seasoned alcoholic. One of his nostrils is partly collapsed – the result of years of cocaine erosion. He is a model of why not to party hardy through your thirties.

But for his off-putting physical presence, Lars is really fun to hang out with. He’s an extremely personably asshole, simultaneously supportive and derisive of people all around him. But funny, and with stories from a lifetime of travel. He’s also very good at pool, and hours skirt by while we drink beers and knock spherical stone balls across the table.

He, like me, is reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Unlike me, Lars can afford to stay in all the famous hotels listed in the book. He spent his week in Saigon hopping between The Majestic, The Grand, The Continental, buying bottle service and a new Vietnamese girl each night. This is how the wealthy white sexpat spends his money.

As long as I steer the conversation, we are OK. We can talk about life in Scandinavia, about our mutual love of books. But when I ask him about his T-shirt, which reads “FUKTOR,” it gets weird again.

“It’s the name of the extreme sports company I work for,” he explains, before veering off again.

“I love this shirt because it looks like ‘Fucked her’. In Finnish it’s pronounced ‘fook-tour’, but, you know…” his eyes glaze as he trails off.

With Lars you can’t get away from sex and fucking and drinking and if you mention America you’ve touched on a very sensitive nerve.

When the conversation turns semi-political later at night, he erupts into the back room from his perch at the music computer to announce in an aggressive slur that he’s “….heard enough about America tonight! Every thirty seconds I hear that word, and that shows where your head is. We need to get beyond that.” His comments are clearly directed towards Zane and myself, the only other Americans in the bar. Everyone stares at him, clearly shocked and annoyed by his oblique harassment of his fellow countrymen.

Silence, before he turns to exit the room saying, “As we say in Finland, ‘Let the flowers bloom,’ or in American: ‘Live and let live’”.

Winning

Thursday was beautiful, our first full day in the beach town of Nha Trang. We had motorbikes, and we were going north, where the Book had promised a quieter stretch of white sand.

Our road was Vietnam’s answer to California’s Hwy 1, a languid collection of curves and climbs along the rocky southeast coast.

Sun was shining and once we left the city, photo opportunities abounded. Floating fishing villages in the shadow of an island; harbor towns you could smell before you saw: fermenting fish hanging in the sun, suspended in plastic bags. Long flat rice paddies are the next shade of green; their organic fertilizing machines the rust-colored shape of happy water buffaloes.

 

We played with a toddler who had never seen a white person before; our day was enriched by memories of why we travel.

I documented the day on my iPod. The multi-machine I use as a camera fit perfectly into the twin plastic recess built into my sexy Spiderman machine of a bike: a black and yellow Yamaha Nouvo. Equipped with a working speedometer!!

 

The pictures piled up around my avenues of enthusiasm, until, at 6 p.m. we meandered back into the beachside metropolis to return the bikes. Grabbing by bag with resonant vibrations running parallel through my meta carpals, the effects of sitting on a piece of rumbling rubber for four straight hours (we never did find the dream-white beach) made themselves known in the tightness of my ass and spine. Suddenly, all I could think of was lying down in the silence of my bed under the moldy fluorescent-lit ceiling.

Which felt wonderful. On the verge of passing out for an afternoon nap, I receded into my pocket to peruse the contents of my iPod’s visual memory database. Empty groping that quickly fell to franticness. Fondling the tiny pocket-within-a-pocket of my shorts. Instant awareness.

I spend a great deal of time mentally organizing the architecture and urban planning of my pocket’s contents. Always striving for a modernist blend of efficiency and protection. I only ever keep that rectangle of plastic and glass in my left pocket – above my cell phone – for easy one-handed access when performing tasks that command the attention of my dominant and steady right hand. It isn’t in its home.

“It’s still in the motorbike,” a news bulletin to the room. “We need to go back right now.”

Once we leave, my head and steps throb to the tune of priority and importance and the soul-filling taste of SPONTANEOUS PURPOSE; I construct the physical memory of my absentmindedness.

In third-person perspective I observe the past as a series of conditionals. I must have grabbed the bag from the pocket under the seat.  Knowing that I didn’t need to return the key or retrieve any collateral, I must have simply walked away – fulfilling, in a dejected inevitability, the prophecy I built, when, hours earlier, I had reminded myself to “not forget the iPod when you return the bike.”

It’s OK.  I assured myself in words and phrases like ‘friendly’… ‘affable’… ‘trustworthy local business’ – building up a mental description of my motobike renters. This part of the world runs on the polar twin pillars of honor and shame. They will – they must have it, waiting for me to return.

Our return, 15 minutes after dropping the bikes off, established a different reality – one grounded in economics and language barriers.

I get my message across all right in simple engrish and extravagant hand cues – exercising a windmill of non-verbal communication to accommodate each quick burst of a shrill clause.

—iPhone

—In bike

—I lose

—I look

The owner, a stout and stalwart looking man with droopy eyes and a square face reflected by a square flat-top of graying hair, pulls a long key out of the pocket of his Members Only jacket and brings me through a heavy gate into the back parking lot.

There was my supposedly faithful bike. Right in front, alone and empty.

Anger begins behind the eyes, a sort of clouding effect. I search the bike again in the standard repeated pawing fashion of Someone Who Has Lost Something. Next I ask the five men who work with The Boss; their job seems to lie somewhere in the multi-disciplinary realm of marketing, maintenance and security. They understand my conundrum, it is easy to see. Unfortunately, they look genuinely bewildered as to how to help.

They never saw it. They don’t know.  Maybe it bounced out?

I hear the words and my anxious anger wants to resist, accuse, demand. Especially of one particular younger guy who is either autistic or on drugs or just a little wacked. He keeps pointing to his own phone, saying, “How much money?” which is either a reference to how much I paid for it, or how much is on the SIM card he thinks is in it, or, maybe, probably, definitely, this is the beginning of a blackmail. Yes! I’m being blackmailed for my iPod by a 5-foot tall Vietnamese boy-man who keeps lifting up his shirt to reveal his pale chest while he shoves one hand into his jeans.

He empties his pockets when asked. And, as I sort of knew all along, they were empty.

At first, losing the iPod was almost a blessing in disguise, once I get over the feeling of naked violation – a child shivering in the forest under the pallid moonlight. Whether I wanted to or not, that small piece of equipment was what connected me to the outside world. The internet in my pocket – at any café the first thing I would do is look for open WiFi networks. Without the option, my only choice now is to take a breath and look at what’s in front of me. This is how I justify not being too angry at the situation.

Yet part of me knows that I can’t totally blame myself for this, and that part wasn’t satisfied with the Vietnamese response to the situation. A hand and accompanying human are necessary to remove something from those motobike pockets. The roll of photos from my entire trip was now sitting in that same someone’s pocket.

For the next two days I experienced Nha Trang with no camera, making preparations for how I could cheaply start taking pictures again.

Still the feeling lingered; the mystery must be solved before I leave this city forever. On our list of chores the day before departure is a trip to the bus office, the route to which conveniently passes by the motobike renter’s sidewalk station.

The little voices in my head urged me to keep an eye out, observe with a filter for shiftiness. Who in this bunch could have taken it?

A woman is lounging in a lawn chair, her feet propped up on the seat of a nearby bike. She wasn’t there during the last interrogation. She is heavily clothed, a large windbreaker hides the lower part of her face and a wide brimmed hat shields her eyes. Her attention is directed towards her lap, at something small in her hands.

Of course I look, but I don’t do much thinking in the next half a second.

Some part of me – the part that does its thinking in my testicles and colon and stomach – that part of me is the one that reacted and grabbed from her hand while screaming “That’s mine you Bitch!”

What had caught my eye was the metallic gleam on the corner of the thing in her hand. A rectangular thing. A rectangular thing with the same carbon-grey coloring as my iPod’s case, with the same eroded, shiny corner. In an instant it was in my hand, and she was looking at me passively, calmly, almost expectantly.

All I can do is yell. Jubilantly at first, then a furious interrogation directed at the chunky impish demon woman in front of me.

“You stole this!”

“This is mine!”

Her first response? I’m not sure if it was an impulse or she thought about it, but she held out her hand, palm skyward and said. “Money,” followed by what could only be her justification, “You leave here,” pointing at the parked bikes. 

“You want me to pay you for what you stole from me. FuckYouYouStupidWhore!” I am screaming with my middle finger as a microphone. I hope that symbol is international.

But BOOOM does that feel good. The fury and violation are dwarfed by my karmic glee. Vindication for my suspicions. The little people whispering to me to not trust too easily, to demand more demandingly, they were correct.

Today is a good day.

P.S. This is what she looks like.