update stuff

Sunday

2008-08-17T01:37:00.002+07:00

Last post about our new houseplants, I promise. I already mentioned that we got corn plants, some tropical green things, and a miniature rubber type tree. Well, there was also a large pot of white and purple orchids. Orchids? Aren't these notoriously difficult to manage? I looked it all up online. Turns out orchid husbandry isn't quite as notorious over here where orchids live. The difficulty is in keeping them warm enough, with enough light, for them to feel comfortably at home. They shouldn't be over- or under-watered either, thanks. Thus armed with valuable information, I set out to grow prize-winning flowers. Actually, I left town for a long weekend. By the time I returned, many of the flowers had fallen right off that plant. Its spongy little leaves were laying morosely along the level of the dirt, a smoggy green. Crap! I think it was because the building staff turned on the dining room AC while we were away, chilling the poor dear. So then Sunshine looked up how to save an orchid. We put it into the fluorescently lit bathroom, where steam from the shower kept its dirt moist and where it was sitting right there on the windowsill for brightness. I cut the deceased flowering runners off right at their nodes and wired them loosely up above the leafy mass in the pot. Three days later the leaves were the right green again, somewhat perkier, and the remaining flowers were staying put on their stems. I think that plant is going to live--but then the woman who'd been promised the other half of our friend's jungle came and took the orchids away (along with the mini rubber type tree). Oh well. I'm not sure I needed potted flora of such an action-packed variety, anyway. [Cavin]

Saturday

2008-08-16T01:29:00.002+07:00

I'm still talking about our plants. We hadn't already gotten any houseplants because shopping's difficult, here. The plant stores are out there, sure, many near the bridge to District Two. But the rigmarole of finding them, judging the health and value of their products and negotiating a price--then securing a cyclo driver to peddle the heavy things back to our apartment--was daunting enough to postpone. Recently several of our friends moved out of town in the first really big personnel rotation since we arrived in Vietnam. One of our departing friends had a house full of really large plants. She'd already promised a couple of them to someone else, but I got the balance. As a matter of fact, on the day movers packed up all her stuff, I got them all. Since she lived on the very next floor down, it was easy to have the movers just haul her plants upstairs to our apartment. This was two days before we left town on a four-day trip to Dalat. I discovered two hundred pounds of potted plants in the hallway first thing after waking up that day: five-foot corn plants, green tropical things with large variegated leaves, maybe a miniature rubber tree? I hauled them all into the apartment first thing. Some of them were too heavy to lift, so I slid them along the floor watching the carpet ripple under the weight. Our living room has jungled overnight. It looks like Where the Wild Things Are: here's the couch and bookshelves, there's the carpet and the Amazon. It sure didn't take much to provide dense foliage in this apartment. My job is to keep the rainforest alive and well until maybe September 2009, when our own movers will drop them off on another floor. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-08-15T23:16:00.000+07:00

Two weeks ago we finally got some plants. Buying plants is just one in a long list of paradoxes we strive to accomplish to keep us sane. Not that buying a plant is a paradox in itself, of course. Buying a plant is a nice way to beautify the home, regulate its atmosphere, and add a muddy, character-building daily routine to whatever else is going on. What is important here, to us, is the touch of life plants can add to the soulless and sharper image of our frequent corporate housing. We were once told the best thing to do when moving around every other year was to make each new house look as much like the last ones as possible--fooling the subconscious into believing the contents of these places constitute some kind of roots. Accordingly, we try to display our decorations in every house (three so far) by putting the same things in similar locations. This makes those locations seem more alike. Therefore, the newness of a place stops at the front door--or at least that's the theory. Plants are a part of this: we like to look around and see plants. We did it before. The paradox comes here: given the relatively universal restrictions on importing agricultural specimens, we have to lose these plants every single time we move away again. So we get them to make our house feel like our home, we nurture them for twenty months or so, and then we have to find a home for them. All so we can start the cycle again somewhere else (where? In Belgrade? Maybe Sarajevo?). It can be an emotionally abusive system for me, nursing little plants into big ones only to start again in the next place. Apparently it keeps me sane. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-08-14T17:37:00.003+07:00

I looked outside Tuesday afternoon to see something burning on the horizon. Smoke billowed from the District Four docks, snaking into the wind above the skyline and mingling with the ever-present monsoon. It was the thick blue-gray of a thunderhead in the humid distance. I watched the plume for a long time. It reminded me of war coverage: distant photos of conflict followed by close-up ramifications. It made me think of Georgia. Under a EU-brokered ceasefire, Russian troops pulled out of Gori today,* handing the battlefield back over to returning law enforcement officers and those who wish to photograph ramifications. The Russian army is still encamped around the countryside. It occupied the city as part of a push to liberate the separatist enclave of South Ossetia, a disputed region nonetheless located within the political frontiers of an ex-Soviet sovereignty. Gori is well outside this disputed zone. As is Georgia's capital Tbilisi, the target of several Russian bombs. It’s all pretty ironic: Russia feels it has the ethical advantage, but in light of Chechnya that's another way of saying Russia feels the ethical right to act contradictorily in regarding territorial interests. Ah, the nineteenth century--how we'd nearly forgotten ye. Riding Tuesday's train of thought: did you know that Sunshine and I were entertaining the idea of applying for a job in Tbilisi? Initially this seemed to have been quashed by the Russians. But this problem will stabilize into a contained simmer, a cold war if you will, before we’d get there. Aren't we entertaining the thought of working in Kosovo? It's either the world's newest country or a separatist Albanian enclave of Serbia, depending on who you talk to. Someday maybe even South Ossetia will have its very own positions to apply for, smoke on the horizon notwithstanding. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-08-12T17:11:00.002+07:00

I haven't been watching the Olympics. We tuned-in last Saturday to no avail. I was hoping that, being so nearby, continuous Asian coverage might allow me access to those events most frequently ignored by big network TV back home--like shooting, judo, and fencing. Really, US network television, do you actually think viewers prefer watching people running around an oval? I would rather watch a swordfight. So I tried; Women's Sabre was scheduled all day Saturday. But Vietnamese television is often wonky, and we were unable to find any Olympics coverage that day. It's normal: sometimes scheduled entertainment events, even nationally televised ones, don't actually end up on TV. We've anticipated live programming before, only to watch it go dark after fifteen minutes and be replaced by some dubbed soap opera in progress. The Olympics aren't much of a loss, really. I remember being excited about them when I was a kid, when they only happened every four years. Back then, the rampant and jingoistic politicizing didn't seem so insufferable; but that's only because I was still a kid. The jingoism has always been, at best, insufferable. This year, China is using this event to affect a posture of benevolence while sweeping many realities under its exportable carpets. The world has taken a lazy stab at protesting Chinese social transgressions and geopolitical avarice by protesting the Olympics themselves. While I write this, the guys who work in our apartment building's lounge are cheering for some very small women lifting very large barbells--and it's pretty infectious, I'll admit. But on another channel, CNN is reporting the advancing Russian invasion of Georgia, a reciprocal aggression in the South Ossetian tug-of-war, a long-awaited outburst which no doubt waited for the world's attention to focus on people running around an oval. [Cavin]

Monday

2008-08-11T22:17:00.002+07:00

I started trying to tell a story yesterday but then wildly digressed. I'll try again: Friday evening Sunshine was doing important job-related stuff so I was on my own for dinner. Often, I take these opportunities to further explore the row of Japanese restaurants along Lê Thánh Tôn Street near the Sài Gòn River. But I'd already done that--she'd also worked late on Thursday. Many of the places I used to go without her have closed down. That's the subject of yesterday's digression. But Friday I decided to eat at Au Parc again. Au Parc is a wonderful place about three blocks from our house. I mention it a lot. If I seem a little ho-hum about being there again Friday night, well it's just because I eat there about three times a week. I start to feel guilty I'm not trying new things more often. But dinner there is always so super. Lately, one of the waiters has adopted me as an unofficial English language tutor. Maybe that’s going too far. This only started because he'd made errors in his workbook. He'd discovered the right answers already, he just needed to know why there were right. He questioned me for about twenty minutes before taking my order. His English Language exam is coming up soon. Since then, he's always got a couple questions handy whenever I arrive. But I'm not a very good unofficial English Language tutor. Friday, when talking about the book I was reading--Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories--I tried to explain what fables were. He asked if they were like metallurgy stories. How dumb am I? He actually had to type something into his mobile phone translator before I understood. Yes, I told him, like mythology--only about animals instead of gods. [Cavin]

Sunday

2008-08-10T23:27:00.000+07:00

Friday evening Sunshine was doing important job-related stuff so I was on my own for dinner. I used to go to the restaurant down the road called Bún Việt (and later Deli Saigon) on those nights. It was one of my favorites. I'd go there when Sunshine worked because she didn't love it as much. Then for some reason, without notice, Bún Việt closed. This happened just before I flew to the states in April. A new place cropped up in the same spot by the time I'd flown back again. I'm not so interested in the new place. These mysterious closings happen all the time. Favorite places like the Vietnamese restaurant Miss Kim, or pan-Asian Green Chili, or the MGM coffee shop, have all disappeared. Some of these have been replaced with new restaurants, others are just cavernous and cluttered gaps where buildings used to be. Luna D'Autunno, our first local Italian restaurant, and my favorite, closed to remodel months ago. By now I'm no longer really banking on their eventual return. At the Indian restaurant Alibaba, also my favorite, the manager informed us personally one night that the restaurant was relocating. We were given their new address on new business cards, a map on the back and everything. But no restaurant has ever opened on the indicated corner. It's all very strange. I need to remember that this happens all the time. The first two restaurants we ever tried to find in our neighborhood, based on high recommendations from our guidebook, had mysteriously disappeared by the time we'd moved in (one, the Indian restaurant Tandoor, merely moved--we did finally find that one). Yeah, so places change. It's just a side-effect of actually living here that we can register, and become disappointed by, these normal cycles. [Cavin]

Saturday

2008-08-09T23:22:00.001+07:00

I didn't mean to leave yesterday's post hanging. It was about umbrellas: how the little ones are convenient for carrying but not for using, and the big ones are the opposite. Here are two ways to tie the topic up: One, I found a folding umbrella at the grocery store that telescopes to about two-feet long closed; and it's as large as a golf umbrella opened. It was about six bucks. I'm returning for some more of them. This covered me during our four-day birthday retreat last weekend. Two (and the reason I was thinking about this yesterday), on Thursday night after perfect Japanese noodle soup with a perfectly fried egg floating in it, I went to Lush, a club near the corner of Lý Tự Trọng and Tôn Đức Thắng streets, and retrieved my lost black umbrella. It had been thirteen days since I'd left it in a locker there, but they still had it. I'm very happy about that. During all this rain protection talk I've forgotten to mention all last week's flooding. The very Friday afternoon that we flew to the soggy central highlands city of Dalat all hell broke over Hồ Chí Minh City. It rained so hard during the last ninety minutes of the workday that many streets in the usually somewhat safe downtown area were flooded--including those streets right outside Sunshine's office building. Parts of central downtown were under nearly two feet of floodwater just in time for rush hour traffic. Scooters and cars stalled out all along downtown Hồ Chí Minh City's busiest streets, and gridlock stalled remaining traffic for kilometers in every rain-soaked direction.* Of course, we were safely in the air between rainstorms and by the time we came home Tuesday, all was right with the world again. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-08-08T22:20:00.000+07:00

It rained the whole week before our recent trip to Dalat. It rains several times every day, in fact. This is normal. What isn't normal is that I didn't have an umbrella that week. During the rainy season, umbrellas tend to accumulate between our shoe hutch and the laundry closet door. Last week there was a little tiny blue one and a little tiny pink one there. My strong black umbrella was lost. Little tiny umbrellas are made for a purse: they collapse on spindly wire fingers and telescope down insubstantial aluminum shafts. Their tops are small and they only protect a radius of two feet. It doesn’t take much breeze to render little umbrellas totally useless. These little things fit their pursey niche, I suppose, but aren't worthwhile against rain. They accumulate because we don’t use them enough to accidentally leave them in taxicabs or nightclubs. My beautiful black umbrella was strong and useful. Also a yard long. Also I'd lost it at the end of the previous week. Every single day I couldn’t use it. I needed to buy another umbrella. I never would have bothered doing this in town--it's pretty easy to avoid the rain at home--but looking online I noticed it was also going to rain every day of our vacation. This raises a question: could I have boarded an airplane with my black umbrella? It folded into a hooked cane with a metal tip. In an environment where security screens for toys and mouthwash, a pointy stick is probably also verboten. But we frequently fly within various rainy seasons, and umbrellas small enough to fit into the checked luggage are essentially worthless. I don't want to accumulate any more of these niche umbrellas--or lose any more of the good ones. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-08-07T22:14:00.002+07:00

I've become a nervous flier. I've mentioned this here almost as often as I've mentioned airplanes. This nervousness is some awesome brand of irony considering how much I travel. Putting armchair labels on things is shorthand I know, but my primary nervousness seemed to begin on my first flight after September eleventh, 2001. Perhaps that's arbitrary. That terrible aviation violence took place during a five-year dry spell between my flights to Port-Au-Prince in 2000 and México City in 2005. Obviously, many other things happened to me during that half-decade (and frankly, the events of nine-eleven even didn't happen to me, except in some collective entitlement sense). But that short Mexican flight was terrifying in a way I'd never felt before. At a quick count, I've taken forty-three flights since that scary day. Over that time the sheer terror has mostly worn off. Also, I've adopted routines to help me cope. Before nine-eleven, I occasionally got a little nervous while landing. Since, I'm continuously nervous; but take-off is the worst. So I work a crossword puzzle during the beginning and end of each flight. It's just something to focus on, less passive than merely reading. Returning from Dalat on Tuesday, a thirty-minute hop nevertheless comprising both a takeoff and a landing, I worked a NYT crossword puzzle written by Nick Grivas (and originally published on a Wednesday). The theme was "Southern-style". Hoot Southernisms frequently irritate me, particularly NYT-style, but I actually had to blog about this one. For the clue "More than tipsy, Southern-style" I was expected to write the answer "drunkasacooter".* Is this some Ma and Pa Kettle-type Hollywood Hee-Haw dialog I'm unfamiliar with? Do readers of the New York Times really think we talk this way? I’m as puzzled as a polecat. As revolted as a revenuer. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-08-06T21:20:00.002+07:00

I've just returned after an eventful two-week hiatus from blogging. I had no idea I was going to take this break, I even tried not to, but eventually had to concede my ability to retroactively write entries for each day I'd fallen behind. This only happens when there's too much happening to leave whatever time it will take to write it all down. What little extra I time did have was spent, during that first week, working up photographs in lieu of blogging. Those begin here, and were originally taken at the beginning of December, when the Dana Leong Band came to Ho Chi Minh City.¹ Also, I've begun posting low resolution movies every Friday (the first, last Friday's, is here; let's see how long it takes me to fall behind on this scheme, too). Low resolution movies are the only kind my camera will make, but I'm doing what I can to fix the irritating auto-focus action this week. Two Fridays back we went to a party at Sunshine's office where I drank a lot of Irish whisky. Not too much, of course; I didn't even drink it all. But I did drink enough to go out and continue drinking until four am, killing any impetus I had to sit and write (or do much else) over the following weekend. There's a story about that night here. That's okay because there was little chance I'd have gotten around to writing much, anyway: that very same Friday we were at long last presented with the massive listing of available jobs for our next post. Final bids are expected by, I believe, sometime in October. Whenever I wasn't taking long showers and popping aspirin with entire bottles of water, I was researching places like Zagreb,² Pristina,³ Podgorica,⁴ and Ljubljana.⁵ [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-08-05T23:51:00.000+07:00

I want to wish my good friend Bronwen Burr a very happy birthday. We are celebrating her today. I hear she celebrated it to excess Saturday. When Bronwen was born, Sunshine and I were on holiday in Xilitla, México. We are out of town on most of Bronwen's birthdays because Sunshine's own birthday is the day before. (Well, more "out of town" than normal--but we're getting confused as to what "in town" actually means.) This makes it easy to remember Bronwen's special day, since we're already doing something special at the right time to celebrate her, too. Last year, we happened to be out of town again, but at just the right place at just the right time: we were visiting Bronwen's house. We got to see her turn one. Today, when Bronwen turned two, we were in Dalat, Vietnam. We had one extra half of a large, purple, two-layer berry cake with icing roses (in various stages of bloom) and bows of curled flat white chocolate. We imagined it would be very nice to share this cake with our friend BB; but, as you know, while it was the right time we were in totally different places. It is becoming very difficult to imagine Bronwen: at two she is twice the girl we remember from her last birthday. I'm afraid she might have similar trouble imagining just how good her half of this cake would have been. There was no way to carry it on the airplane this afternoon, let alone mail it around the planet to Bronwen. Maybe it isn’t such a hot present, this tease of a half-eaten cake. So I took a picture for her instead, now she can someday imagine having, instead of eating, her half-cake. It's here when she wants it. [Cavin]

Birthday

2008-08-04T18:04:00.002+07:00

Dear everybody. We're on a wonderful four-day vacation in Dalat. Dalat is pretty close to Ho Chi Minh City geographically, but in temperament it is decidedly different. It's very cool for one thing. When it rains, it rains all week without any break. There are plushy grass-like mosses and pine forests, spongy this time of year. I probably wouldn't pause to pick-up on the accidentally dropped Update trail right now, not while we're off on holiday. But this is a vacation made up entirely of extended, luxurious pauses, our first in forever, and also made up of Sunshine's birthday, her thirty-first, which happens to be today. Since I consistently demonstrate a tendency to elaborate on needless minutia here, I imagined it wouldn't really be fitting to miss making note of this special day. Dear Sunshine, happy birthday. We just enjoyed high tea, my first ever, in conjunction with a chocolate buffet (two words that nestle together so winningly that they should only be employed on a cozy, rainy birthday). Also, since this is turning out to be a number of open letters, I'll add a carbon copy: dear Gilberto Hernandez, many years ago you sat at your art table and drew the final couple dozen or so pages of Human Diastrophism, one of my favorite Palomar stories from Love and Rockets. One of these pages, one of the best, originally appearing as the eighty-fifth page of that story in issue number twenty-six of the magazine, I think, and renumbered to page eighty-eight for various omnibus reprints, has wound its way to Vietnam. Here it has made one birthday girl very happy; and she promises to cherish your piece. Since I have rather retroactively hijacked your collaboration in this year's big surprise, I wanted to thank you. Yours truly. [Cavin]

Sunday

2008-07-20T18:27:00.002+07:00

First of all, and I know this is pretty late notice, I urge you to go watch the three acts of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog here. The show, tantamount to a half-hour sitcom (a pilot? a viral advertisement? sheer wankery? who knows), is a comics-inspired musical by Joss Whedon, et al., detailing the emergence of lovelorn supervillain wannabe Dr. Horrible (Neil Patrick Harris). Look for Nathan Fillion's show-stopping number in the final act, itself well worth the price of admission. Price? Well, I spent all week meaning to post this link Saturday, when the third installment finally became available via free streaming video. But then I didn't ever actually post anything yesterday. I wanted to go ahead and link along the info, though so here it is almost too late! Anyone within the sight of my voice should hurry on over and watch, since the geocentric instructions indicate that these free versions of the ...Blog will only "stay up until midnight Sunday July 20th." When is that exactly, Joss? I imagine he means the local midnight after Sunday night, in the Los Angeles time zone. That's where Mr. Whedon lives. If you miss the boat on this deadline, there's always the opportunity to just buy the individual acts, for about six bucks total, at the link I've provided above. Okay, well, that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for a "second of all..." to pair up with the first line up there, does it? Luckily, I've saved up some totally random crap for this sort of situation. Here you will find a large Japanese page of downloadable animated line drawing .gifs. What you do with them is up to you, but I like to just watch them wobble on the page together like some crazy freak-out wallpaper. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-07-18T23:36:00.002+07:00

After a week working long days as a volunteer, Sunshine finally took last Sunday off, allowing us to do some Nha Trang tourism together. We hopped into a cab and repeated the words "Chăm Pa" until we were taken the kilometer or so north to the Po Nagar Towers complex.¹ This was my first opportunity to see an ancient site in Vietnam. The Po Nagar complex is located just across what must have initially been the town's northern demarcation: a river delta filled with blue wooden fishing boats. By now, Nha Trang has grown around the temple; currently the site provides a shady and peaceful spot overlooking the standard Vietnamese bustle on all sides. Po Nagar is a three-tiered Chăm Pa complex covering a small hill. Four towers remain: stone brick structures with terraced pyramid roofs² at the top of stairs too small and steep for use. Trees provide some tropical shade. Epiphytes grow in the zigzags of ornate brickwork. At the bottom of the hill, only brick columns remain of another structure, an entryway to the complex. The whole area dates to the second century, but remaining structures were rebuilt primarily after the tenth. Some pristine touches might have been added as late as last week. Although this site was originally more extensive, I hesitate to use the word "ruins" in conjunction with Po Nagar. Locals still worship here, keeling in the cramped spaces with incense. Signs asked us to please remove our shoes before entering. I met my first Vietnamese monk up that hill, a beatific bald man in gold robes who calmly wished me a good day. He was just clearly peaceful, as if he'd stepped from some ideal--an ideal of calm over Vietnam: there under his arm was his matching gold motorcycle helmet. [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-07-17T23:31:00.002+07:00

Việt Nam is such an interesting place. Historically, it's almost always been divided in some way. The north endures its half-year rainy season during the very six months of the southern dry season. Different nations colonized different regions, sparking contiguous civil conflicts in the pursuit of ideology and nationalism. The history of ancient Việt Nam is then uncannily familiar. Woefully simplified: the first colonization of the region was from the north in the second century BC, after which successive Chinese dynasties managed a lower kingdom spanning from the Red River Delta south almost to Huế. During this time, a local Sino-Viet culture was burgeoning, eventually gaining its independence in the tenth century only to remain a tributary state until ties with China were totally cut during the Mongol invasions beginning three hundred years later.¹ In the interim, the newly autonomous Việt culture were looking to expand southward, where they discovered the Indo-Asian culture of Chăm Pa occupying five principalities along the South China seaboard.² The Chăm Pa, arrived several centuries before, were directly related to that other great Vedic culture, the Khmer Kingdom,³ which occupied the rest of the southeast Asian mainland from the Malay Peninsula to well east of the Mekong Delta. During this time of initial contact, the Chăm Pa kingdom was at its height, but weakened under northern aggression over the following nine centuries, finally being subsumed by the Việt people. That this small region supported two very different initial cultures--Indian from the east and Chinese from the north--can stand as some tenuously related introduction to a national dualism become all too characteristic here. That those cultures were initially divided eerily close to the seventeenth parallel beggars belief. This is all just in the way of inadequate background for tomorrow's thing. Stay tuned. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-07-16T16:25:00.002+07:00

We arrived home in Hồ Chí Minh City a little before seven last night. Of course, because we'd been two hours early for our flight it took an extra hour before the crew managed to dislodge our bags from the very back corner of the cargo hold. Then, for the second time now, we hoped into a taxi with a driver who had zero idea how to get to our apartment. We've gotten comfortable with the many routes through Districts One and Three, including which roads are one-way and so must be accessed from points even further southwest than our intersection. We can now point our way home with some confidence, but we didn't actually arrive there until after eight fifteen. Since today is the day Miss Hương typically comes and cooks dinner for us, we didn't have to go back out. Hot shrimp and squid kabobs and pesto gnocchi were waiting to be reheated. It's good to be home. Today I'm back in our building's bar again, updating this column. The odd country music guitar track they're playing over and over is turned up way too loud; the lounge attendants are watching one of the Mothra movies on the Chinese Channel. The convenience store woman is bursting with excitement. Every time I step out of our elevator after a week's absence, the group of people who work on the first floor question me about where I've been and what I've been doing there. Today, the convenience clerk couldn't wait to tell them for me, she's bouncing around like a cute puppy. They have been in Nha Trang, she tells the others. She's not content to let me remain astounded long, turning to me and hopping up and down. I saw your wife on TV, she tells me.* [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-07-15T23:59:00.000+07:00

There's more to be said in my coverage of the 2008 Miss Universe Pageant. About standing around in the mind-boggling Nha Trang swelter, three-piece suited, taking pictures of departing queens. About the round-table discussion with a group of reporters in the Sailor's Club bar yesterday afternoon. About the funny events of our plane ride home this evening. All in all, it was an interesting time, but even though I never even spoke to a contestant until we were all in the airport today, it was much more difficult to snark at the expense of these women whose incredibly taxing ordeal was so much more evident live, played out over the last grueling month, than it ever seemed on TV. I miss that guilt-free snarking, and I hope that I'll someday regain it, even knowing what I know now. There's also another oddity to this year's outcome, possibly creditable to some slipshod event planning with the organization committee. Do you remember how Miss Thailand won the online vote for Best National Costume?¹ Did you notice that she was not among the ten finalists of that event, at least as it was judged in Hồ Chí Minh City a few weeks prior?² The Indian press was especially surprised.³ But I'll let this be the last of the pageant updates. We woke up early enough this morning to enjoy one last miso soup and stinky French cheese breakfast from the VIP lounge buffet before checking out. I was recently complaining about all our early flights of late, but today we didn't fly until six pm. I can complain about this too, since we had to kill nervous pre-flight time all afternoon; but I won't--it was nice to finally do some honest-to-god tourist crap around town during those last few hours. [Cavin]

Monday

2008-07-14T20:03:00.000+07:00

By eleven this morning the show was over. Seventy-some Miss Wherevers were riding golf carts back home to what might've been their first resort hotel cocktail in Vietnam. Miss Venezuela was not. The newly-dubbed Miss Universe was enduring her first press conference after that nation's fifth victory in the pageant, which incidentally ended one long dry spell for the Venezuelan beauty queen machine. Dayana Mendoza squeaked ahead of a talented Miss Colombia during typically asinine questions from leering judges: "When is a woman satisfied?" --bitch please. During the press conference, she was forced to endure more asininity. Some journalists harbor prejudices about beauty queens. Compare this story with this one. In both, Miss Universe is asked about her kidnapping, and in both she answers with a canned non-sequitur. But in one she's presented as an engaged young woman and in the other she's characterized as fluffy ditz. Without clicking, guess which story is from the USA. Big pageant news again this year: Miss USA's tumble down the stairs in her evening gown. The US journalist linked above tries to demonstrate a pre-show hubris I'm not sure I'm getting from her quote. Many journalists chuckled over Crystal Stewart's spill, comparing it with last year's. I don't see much comparison. Miss USA 2007 fell all the way down and got equally back up with undeniable poise,¹ whereas Miss Stewart awkwardly caught herself and, unwilling to sit and unable to stand, wobbled in a unleveraged crouch before finally righting herself.² Then she gave herself a big overhead clap, sealing her semi-finalist position. It was all Jerry Springer's fault: the emcee totally announced her twice. It was that second cue when, concerned she was coming on four seconds too early, Miss Stewart physically stuttered on the glossy steps and fell ass-over-teakettle. [Cavin]

Sunday

2008-07-13T21:26:00.001+07:00

Right now it's nine pm Sunday night here in beautiful Nha Trang, Viet Nam. Twelve time zones around the world, corrected for Daylight Saving Time, it's right at ten am on the same day. That would be the Eastern Time Zone of the United States, including each of those particular places Sunshine and I call home. When it's finally nine pm Sunday night there, eleven hours from now, the 2008 Miss Universe Pageant will begin its live telecast to time zones all around the globe. This is my meandering way of making obvious the fact that, while my friends and neighbors are tuning-in to watch the broadcast this evening, Sunshine and I will be dressed to the hot nines and settling-in for the very same show tomorrow morning. We'll be just on the other side of the TV screen from those Eastern Time Zoners, yet outside the Diamond Bay auditorium it will be eight o'clock in the morning. The pageant should be over by ten thirty or so, and there might be some press-type things afterward. If the same sorta governmental bungling that stopped all the cabs from picking people up after Tuesday's Presentation Event happens again tomorrow, it will be in the blazing noontime heat. This will surely kill me. Last night's bar adventure included drinks with Viet Nam's Agence France-Presse reporter. Today he delivered this story, which includes the following:

Many favoured Miss Venezuela, [...] whose country is admired here as a 'pageant powerhouse' that has long drilled contestants with makeovers, English classes and runway-practice.

"She seems to come with that mindset that, no matter what happens on the final night, you're only a Miss Universe contestant once in your life and you have to enjoy it," enthused one contest insider [*] who asked not to be named.

[Cavin]

Saturday

2008-07-12T23:57:00.000+07:00

I'm still feeling relatively wretched today. Most of the crappy illness has subsided, but I'm left with all the ick. I've finished the books I brought with me. I spend my days trying not to go to bed too early, but I'm still asleep before midnight. So then I'm awake for the complimentary breakfast buffet every morning. It's worth bragging about: the sushi is pretty good, the dried figs and kiwi are excellent, and there are usually about a dozen kinds of pastry. All this compliments the standards: cereals, phở bò, stir-fry, passion fruit juice, durian. It's a breakfast worth getting out of bed for. Also worth bragging about: the first-floor Japanese restaurant I frequent those evenings when I don't feel well enough to walk out into the heat. They have excellent sake. Between these gustatory daily milestones there's nothing very good on TV and nobody to talk to. Tonight, Sunshine was working rehearsals until almost nine pm. I was (barely) feeling up to meeting her at a restaurant about a kilometer down the beach. I waited until dark to walk there. The seaside is popular on Saturday night. Families barbecue together in the dark. Every few feet blankets are spread with concessions--sodas, dried squid, fruit. It was still very hot and humid, even at night. The place we were meeting, the Sailor's Club, is a confluence of three restaurant types: Indian, Italian, and Vietnamese Bar. The latter takes over after dark. We were served by space-suited Tiger Beer Girls while the nearly karaoke stylings of some nameless Filipino band blared too loudly to talk over. Partiers in attendance included the current Miss Universe and her entourage. It was excruciating; I wolfed my fried seafood sampler down in record time and begged to return to the hotel. [Cavin]

Friday

2008-07-11T19:49:00.003+07:00

I came down with an annoying cold late Wednesday night, feeling those depths of fidgety malaise that always herald this sort of thing. It also seemed monstrously cold in our hotel room, something I credit more to my sickening perception than the actual climate. I didn't think much of these symptoms at the time, but by Thursday morning I was nearly bedridden. Luckily, I'm in the sort of seaside paradise nineteenth century doctors routinely prescribed to their ailing clientele. Also, I'm free to do nothing all day long. For Sunshine it's different: she's here to see gala events, sure, but she's also volunteering her vacation time to the pageant. She's been working twelve-hour shifts almost daily, helping the Miss Universe staff by stocking dressing rooms, herding Beauty Queens from one interview to another, troubleshooting language-barrier problems between the Universe staff and Vietnamese-speaking caterers and choreographers and whatnot. I've been dividing my time between gazing over the South China Sea and rereading Treasure Island. She's been working hard--meeting co-emcee Jerry Springer, making friends with the current Miss Venezuela, Dayana Mendoza, and generally accruing wads of typically hilarious anecdotal material. Having done nothing, then, I must either discuss Treasure Island or Miss Universe things from last month. Back at the Miss Universe National Contest,¹ we noticed Miss Kosovo was wearing a sash reading "Kosova". Did you notice this?² We started theorizing about how, like many countries, Việt Nam did not yet recognize the sovereignty of the newest little nation in the world.³ Indeed, Zana Krasniqi was announced at that very event as "Miss Serbia-Kosovo." Was her sash indicative of the red tape hoops Kosovar nationals must now navigate for their Vietnamese visa? Nah, it was just a typo. What contrived geopolitical conspiracy might we have imagined for "Miss Phillippines"?⁴ [Cavin]

Thursday

2008-07-10T23:52:00.000+07:00

We arrived at the Presentation Event Tuesday night at six-something. It started about a half-hour late at seven thirty. We had to talk our way through five security checkpoints along the way. These were operated by the police, on the road between the town and its airport. I was hot in my three-piece suit. The ticket had specified "formal" dress, devalued to "cocktail"--whatever that means--in the second draft. Walking down the dirt track beside the road, where the taxi let us off, I noticed most of the people around me were wearing jeans and T-shirts. It's the first time in my whole life I've felt overdressed, something I might have relished in a different climate. Throughout the show, the emcees kept telling me how well the AC was working while I sweltered. The people around me seemed fine in halter tops and shorts. Many of them were from other areas of the auditorium, moved into more expensive forward sections to fill unsold seats. Nice idea; only people in the back were advanced to unfilled seats in front of us, meaning that we'd paid significantly more for worse seats. I still wouldn't be complaining, except we couldn't see for the first twenty minutes due to people milling around in front of us. The giant TV screens weren't working. The tickets said "no children under six," but there were screaming kids everywhere. Same with "ringing phones" and "flash photography." There's more, but I'll skip to the end: because the police were stopping anyone without a ticket at five checkpoints, no cabs were available to pick us up after the show. We ended up having to walk a dirty, sandy mile--in "cocktail" dress--to where all the cabs had been forced to pull over and wait for us. [Cavin]

Wednesday

2008-07-09T23:02:00.002+07:00

Last night's Miss Universe Presentation event was a disappointment. Also, it was a little bit frustrating. The biggest source of disappointment was that the show, which I thought would include all the elements of the Final Pageant, finally enacted by all contestants, only ended up including the gown and swimwear events. I was most excited by the prospect of at long last seeing more than the top five contestants answering that interview question, my second-favorite part of the whole Miss Universe routine (my first-favorite is the National Costume Event, which was judged during its own event earlier in the pageant month^1,2). The judges do interview all the contestants, of course, and formulate scoring based on those interviews; but this happened off-stage before last night's thing. I'm disappointed because the contestants I find most interesting frequently never make the top fifteen, let alone the final five, and I wanted to hear them talk. On to frustration: the word that continually came up last night was "half-baked." The event itself is produced by the Miss Universe Organization in a venue masterminded by a local organization company which has won a bid for the work. It’s probably par for the course, but last night’s venue, the Diamond Bay Resort Hotel and Convention Center Theater,³ was built from the ground up to house Miss Universe after that Vietnamese organizational entity won their bid. Five months ago, there was nothing standing in a lonely bend in the national highway, twenty minutes south of town, which is now flanked by these enormous yellow buildings. The thing is, they still aren't really finished: the entryway is mostly gravel, the floors are uncarpeted, and the seats aren't all bolted down right. Nobody seemed to have any idea what they were doing, but more on that tomorrow. [Cavin]

Tuesday

2008-07-08T16:43:00.000+07:00

We've come to Nha Trang, about a quarter of the way up the S-shape of Vietnam's eastern seaboard from Hồ Chí Minh City, to see the Miss Universe Pageant. Well, there's more really: we're here to engage in a week of beauty activities, culminating in the live event itself at the beginning of next week. We flew in yesterday, drove forty minutes up National Road A-1 (copiously hung with banner after banner pinkly depicting whatever is necessary to welcome contestants from seventy-nine other nations), and checked into our hotel, the Sunrise Beach Resort.* We had a little trouble finding available rooms, even months ago, so we resorted to occupying an expensive suite overlooking the blue, blue and coconut palm-fringed water of this gorgeous South China Beach bay. Sadly, the main thoroughfare runs between the hotel and the sand, but that's little enough of a nuisance up on the fifth floor. Miss Universe things began happening immediately after check-in: I needed to scramble to get my laundry dry-cleaned and pressed. We were already in a rush about this yesterday because tonight is the Presentation Event, a longer version of the beauty pageant where voting will be done to determine the fifteen semi-finalists. During the annual live broadcast of the Final Night Event, the eighty women competing will be winnowed to these fifteen semi-finalists before the first commercial break. Throughout the evening, viewers see only these contestants modeling their swimwear and gowns, answering interview questions, etc. The show tonight is about watching all eighty contestants do these things, and determining which Misses will be announced as semi-finalists at the beginning of the broadcast. So I need my suit available immediately, tonight, and will then need to have it cleaned again for that other show at the end of our vacation. [Cavin]