have no fear, the camera's here

Filming on Wednesday for VTV6's "All Connect" went pretty smoothly, taking only a little over 2 hours. Television is television, so if any of us got really flustered or stuck on a question, all we had to do was pause, recollect ourselves, and start over, thanks to the beauty of editing.

Team G-Unit: me, Dave, and Zeo (from left to right).

Our opposing team, G-Not: Christopher (who actually always dresses like that), Bibi, and Phil.

As for tonight: I'm going to the Brazil v. Viet Nam football game!

that's culturally insensitive

Shopping for gangsta clothing in Viet Nam is quite the trip. Not only is "hip hop" synonymous to "skater" here, but b-girls (the closest thing I've found so far to the image I was going for in my mind) generally either dress 1) exactly like boys, 2) super clubby (which I cannot appear on national television wearing), 3) super cutesy, 4) like Avril Lavigne, or 5) like a warped version of Euro gone 80's. Furthermore, the concept of baggy does not seem to exist for the majority of men.

Needless to say, my 3-hour long search to find something that'd make me look like I could bust a cap in your ass was a total failure.

But I did learn one great lesson: apparently, illegal parking in Viet Nam does exist. Who knew?

Dave and I sure didn't.

We were just coming back from wandering the Old Quarter (after purchasing a fabulous red doo-rag for him), when we realized that his motorbike was no longer where we had parked it. We walked down the street, thinking that maybe somebody had moved it, but soon came back to ask a shopkeeper if he had seen what had happened to the motorbike. The man spoke no English, and, after we had mimed "motorbike" to him, only said, "Police!" a bunch of times. We didn't know if he was trying to tell us to report the missing motorbike to the police or that the police had taken it.

We decided to walk down an adjacent street when we saw it: Dave's motorbike, parked in front of a yellow building. We figured we'd found the police station.

There was one desk inside with two men in green uniforms who, true to our luck, did not know any English except to say, "You sit. You wait." We didn't know what we were waiting for and our efforts to ask "Who?" and "Why?" were futile, so we got some water and then hung around as the two police officers laughed with each other, speaking rapid Vietnamese and grinning at us.

About five minutes later, a big van pulls up and about 5 more policemen came inside. They asked a few questions to the two sitting policemen and, after hearing whatever the answer was, started laughing and talking to themselves. Dave and I decided at this point that they had to be messing with us because they looked too happy not to be. The policemen all started asking us, "Where you from?" and, after hearing we were from America, one of them showed us a tattoo he had on his chest of the Statue of Liberty.

Then, all of a sudden, one of the policemen turned serious, said something in Vietnamese really quickly, reached over to Dave, lifted up his shirt, and then lifted up his pants, which had been sagging (though he was wearing a belt).

"Vietnam. Up! Good," he said, as he gave us the thumbs up sign and indicated that Dave should tighten his belt.

I can only imagine what they would have said to us if Dave had been wearing his doo-rag.

too much silence can be misleading

I'm back in good ol' Hanoi, in the polluted air, constantly honking traffic, and my old room at the guesthouse where the water pressure never really makes it to the top floor, where there is no elevator (or shower curtain, for that matter), where the only two breakfast options are bread or pho, and honestly it feels great.

Not that I didn't have a complete and absolute blast on the tour of Central Viet Nam that we took this past week. Because I absolutely did, even though I've never been so scarred by bathrooms in my life (you are my hero, inventor of Purell) and I don't think I've woken up before 7 am for that many days in a row since... high school. During the week, we trekked through the mountains and rice paddies; got caught in the rain; slept in a communal house in a village for one night (and got woken up at about 5 am by roosters); saw the My Son temples; and rented cyclos in Hue (not just to ride, but also to drive and race around the city in oncoming traffic -- with a quick stop to get sugar cane juice, freshly squeezed, of course). I also got 2 dresses and a complete suit fitted and made for me in Hoi An (known as the tailoring capital of the nation); almost hit a motorbike while riding a bike at night in Hoi An (which really is quite pathetic because traffic there is absolutely tame in comparison to traffic in Hanoi); got my fortune told (twice); took about 500 pictures; and spent what feels like a lifetime's worth of time on a bus, bumping along from Hue to Hoi An to Da Nang to Kon Tum.

(And I don't even want to think about how many grammatical errors, run-on sentences, and comma splices just happened in that above paragraph.)

But of all the family-style dinners we had (and we had them every night), the one that stands out in my mind does so because of a reason more somber than our divide-and-conquer eating style or our ongoing game of anywhere-anytime charades.

To be brief (because I hate writing about things I wish had never happened): we were just finishing up our dinner at Banana Leaves in Hoi An, when Professor Harms stood up to say that he had just received a phone call telling us that one of our program coordinators, Hiliary, had been killed in a car accident in Portland, Oregon.

I remember thinking as he was talking that he must be joking. But then Alex just looked at me and said, "Why would he joke about this?" And it really sunk in.

I'll never forget the looks on everyone's faces, the silence that followed, the untouched fruit that came to the table, Jack Johnson's "No Other Way" playing in the background.

Thanks, Hiliary, for sharing with us your love for Viet Nam, for making Hanoi feel a little more like home, and for always being a smiling face.

my life as a sitcom

I cannot believe this conversation just happened:

Her: i need to chug my coffee before i go to lab

Me: i need to chug a coffee before i go to the club

Her: this is such a bad idea

Me: this is such a bad idea
Her: i love how we think the same

In my defense, we're in different time zones.

sprichst du englisch

I need to stop speaking English loudly in quiet places, assuming that people won't understand what I'm saying.

Yesterday, Phil, Thu, and I went to dinner next door at Kaiser Kaffee, when a group of about five 30 and 40-something year old Vietnamese men came in and sat down at the table across from us, all of them in white button-down dress shirts ("white collar" is apparently taken quite literally here). They ordered a minikeg of imported German beer, hot dogs, and cigarettes for their table. I commented to Phil about how I loved Asian bossmen getting drunk after work.

I noticed a few of them staring over at our table several times -- and you could definitely tell that they were talking about us -- when, just as we had our plates cleared, the waitress came over with three empty beer glasses and told us that the Asian bossmen wanted to invite us to join them. The men immediately came over to fill up our mugs with beer, cheers were said all around, and introductions were made. Turns out, not only were they all fluent in English, but two of them were actually working in London, and all of them were CEOs or some sort of managing director at major finance/investment banking firms. It also turns out that they were celebrating a birthday, which is why more and more Asian bossmen kept coming in the door to join the party. More cheers were said, extra food was ordered for our end of the table (though none of us ate any since we had just finished dinner), business cards and cell phone numbers were exchanged, and the Asian bossmen ended up paying for our meal as well.

Who needs college networking workshops when there are German-themed cafes next door?