Saigon Vittles

HAIKU

A dog is missing.

He strayed too far from Master.

I hope he's not lunch.

Vietnamese cuisine is a dichotomy. On one side, it is light and flavorful. The Vietnamese eat aromatic herbs like vegetables. In fact, I don't even think they distinguish between herbs and vegetables. It is all called "rau". It is hard to order a Vietnamese dish without getting some kind of antioxidant on your plate. Most of the ingredients in Vietnamese food are easily recognizable and commonly eaten in America. There are many pork, beef and chicken dishes, as well as lots of vegetarian fare. I am a huge fan of Vietnamese food, fish sauce and all.

That being said, Vietnamese cuisine has a darker, more exotic side.

Let's start with the old stereotype... thịt chó. Dog meat. They eat it here. Now, it is still sort of a novelty to many Vietnamese. It seems that the older, more traditional folks are more fond of it, like chitterlings back home in North Carolina. I am told it is a little gamey, a little bit fatty and sweet. I'll take their word for it.

Another exotic food here is the trung vit long. Also known as the balut in the Philippines, this is a mature duck egg, usually about in the 17th day of gestation. Basically it's a baby duck, but the bones and bill haven't hardened yet. Yum! The trung vit long is boiled and served in brine. I am told it tastes like chicken. As with questions about nuclear warheads on Navy vessels... I can neither confirm nor deny having eaten a balut yesterday.

Scorpions are also on the menu here. I have not found any yet, but I know where to go when I decide to try one. They are generally served fried, and have a somewhat fishy taste. They are chewy, apparently. I think I'd prefer crunchy.

Frog legs! I went to a local market yesterday (where I may or may not have encountered a balut) and generally speaking, when you buy a critter for cookin' around here, it is alive and kicking. Literally. There were basins full of live fish, and usually there were a few frogs tethered by the legs nearby. I mentioned the frogs to my guide, Duy, who turned his nose up at them. I decided not to mention that I used to gig frogs all the time in the summers as a teenager, and ate the legs like chicken. I'll come back for them later when Duy isn't around.

Geckos. Those are plentiful around here. They are not known for selling car insurance in Vietnam. If one is so inclined, one can get lunch off the apartment wall here. I have quite a few. Maybe that's how you wind up on the menu in Vietnam, historically speaking. Slither, crawl or hop into plain view and you'll get yourself barbecued. Just like good old North Carolina.

Field rats. OK, we don't eat those in North Carolina. At least not any more. These are big 'ol fat field rats. They are something of a delicacy, especially in the central region of Vietnam.

Silkworms. I can't comment. I have only eaten one or two bugs in my life, and I think I was too drunk to remember the taste. So, I'll reserve judgment on the bugs for now.

There are some other exotic foods that I have not yet seen, and I am not really looking. One is "tiet canh", otherwise known as raw blood soup. Cow testicles are also available. I ate chitterlings back home, but always balked at the cow and sheep balls. I'll rely on others to tell me of the experience.

One last exotic food to be found here is not really food at all. It is coffee. Specifically, it is called Weasel Coffee. Weasel coffee is coffee made from beans that have passed through the digestive tract of a civet. Now, a civet is not a weasel. It is a type of wild cat, but apparently we're not standing on ceremony or semantics here. Besides, it's poop coffee for crying out loud, who cares what kind of animal pooped it? I have neither tried nor am interested in trying it, but am offering the infomation up to you, dear reader, in the event you find yourself in Vietnam craving some kitty poop coffee. Accept no substitutes however, as there is fake kitty poop coffee out there, which might not have been pooped at all. Or pooped out of a less savory animal than a civet. Or a weasel, for that matter.

Amelia

I just had to stick around. After all, my new boss was very understanding; telling me to take all the time I needed. So far, State has been a very family friendly place. Either that, or my presence at my new post is just not all that necessary right away. Probably a combination of the two. Anyhow, the reason for me lingering in the States just a little longer was that my second daughter made her appearance last week. She is a dainty little thing. She is also beautiful like her sister, but of course if this opinion were part of an official proceeding I would have to recuse myself from the process.

Now, with about ten days to get acquainted with her, I'm going to leave her and head off to Vietnam. I'll see her again soon, as Mrs. Warpiper and Tater will bring her over in a couple months. When I think about the separation and feel sorry for myself I think about all the men and women in uniform who do not have the options I do; to be able to pick and choose when I leave to perform my duty. I wonder what it must be like to be away from your child for a year. Or, to not even see your kid until he or she is already smiling and starting to walk. I could have stayed longer. Looking now at the past short week that seemed like it would be so long back when I planned it, I wonder if I shouldn't have taken longer.

For the time being, I'll subsist on Skype and Vonage, and try to find the inspiration for a nickname. People are only touched with divine inspiration so many times, and I burned up a lot of it on the perfection that is Tater.

Coming out of my cave.

Winter is drawing to a close. The bear slowly comes to life from his long drowse, digs his way out of his hole, and greets the sun.

I am sorry for being underground for so long. Language training, although very rewarding, does not inspire me to do much other than go to class, study, and well, that's about it. Yesterday after a very stressful week in class, I took my language test and reached my proficiency goal in Vietnamese. Talking with a colleague who just passed his Bangla (Bengali) test, we agreed that the feeling is not like graduation from college where you feel elated. It is less of a happy feeling and more of a sensation that you have instantly lost 50 pounds. Maybe I don't feel elated because there is still so much to do. Make arrangements for packing up out stuff, moving to Potomac temporarily to await the arrival of a new baby, cleaning up loose ends at FSI, preparing for another assignment at Main State, trying to sell the truck, trying to get set up for adding another kid to the "official" family as far as the State Department is concerned, et cetera et cetera.

I have been employed by the State Department for almost exactly one year. I have yet to actually go out into the world and do what I was hired to do. That will change very soon. In spite of the fact that I have done nothing but train since arriving here, the experience thus far has been quite rewarding. That is the positive. If I can find a negative so far, it is that you are never really not busy. Even when you're not at work, there's always something that needs to get done. I addition to performing whatever your assigned duties are, you also have to take care of yourself and your family. That means that when you aren't at work you still have mounds of bureaucratic paper to move. Police work was always busy, but once I went home and took the uniform off, my time was generally free.

Not yet having been to post, I still cannot comment on the life overseas. That being said, I like to be frank about these things in case you are reading this blog trying to decide if the Foreign Service is for you. Personally, this was one of the best choices I have ever made. However, trotting the globe is not so simple as hopping on an airplane. You'll live out of temporary apartments and hotel rooms enroute to that plush, exotic locale, and once you get there you'll have just enough time to get settled before you have to pull chocks and go somewhere else. You have to condense your life and the lives of your family members down to 7000 pounds and then further condense it down to a few hundred pounds that will get you through until the 7000 pounds of your life catch up to you in Timbuktu. For me, it is an adventure. Shucking off hundreds of knick-knacks and unnecessary belongings is like shedding skin to me. For others, it is not a stable existence and therefore stressful.

In a couple days, Mrs. Warpiper and I will condense our lives down to two 50 pound bags per person while the rest of our stuff goes on the slow boat. We'll move to Maryland for a few weeks to await the new wee bitty one. A week or so ofter the baby comes, we'll separate as I go to Vietnam and leave the family behind for a couple months. After they join me, our lives will arrive on a ship, packed in boxes. Hopefully we'll finally get settled in so we can enjoy another year of feeling like we finally "live" somewhere. Then we'll move again.

Like I told you, it's an adventure.

Thumbs Up, Daddy!

Went to Chevy Chase this week to get a look at the new wee bitty one....


That's my girl!


In other news, Vietnamese training is, well, ongoing. Where all the time has gone I cannot tell, but if there is anything akin to purgatory on earth it must be the intensive language training at FSI. You are not in the hell of your former job/life/whatever, but you are also not in the heaven of your first post. In a way, it feels like I have plunged into the darkest jungle of the Congo, cut off from man and civilization and I am just waiting for a "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" moment when I come out the other side.

In actuality, it really isn't that bad, but you do seem to sort of go into a kind of suspended animation where your social and family life all grind down to a snail's pace. I also recently experienced the phenomenon known as "the wall." It was as if I just stopped absorbing any Vietnamese for a week or two, and I also felt like I had forgotten some of the simplest things I had learned in the first weeks of training. I have heard tell of tears of frustration at this point in training. Fortunately I have not melted down, but there have been moments when I wanted to go kick something, for sure.

I found that my remedy for the frustration was to review all the things I have already learned. The sheer amount of this language that I do know is very encouraging, I just had to remind myself that I do in fact know a lot of Vietnamese, and can actually have a coherent conversation using the language.

Somebody thinks we're beautiful.

Nation names in Vietnamese fall into two distinct groups:

1. Cognates

2. Names that actually mean something.

For instance, cognates are recognizable, like Thái Lan or Canada. Non-cognates have absolutely no rhyme or reason. Germany is nước Đức, Australia is nước Úc, and Belgium is nước Bỉ. (By the way, "nước" simply means "country.")

America is nước Mỹ. It never occurred to me to ask my instructor what that word actually means. During class, we translated "United States of America." It is Hợp chủng quốc Hoa Kỳ. The first three words literally mean "united states." The interesting part is the last two words. Hoa means "flower," and kỳ means "flag." In Vietnamese, our nation's name literally means "United States of the Floral Flag." Apparently the Vietnamese think we have a busy flag. I never thought of it that way, but as flags go, ours IS a little busy.

The word for America is nước Mỹ. It means "beautiful country." Americans are người Mỹ, or, "people of the beautiful country".

I'll take it.

Tôi nói tiếng Việt một ít.

It is hard to believe that I have been learning to speak Vietnamese for four weeks now. It is a strange feeling knowing that I know so little and can barely communicate in this new language, yet when I review the vocabulary that I currently have it comes out to about 200-300 words. The sheer amount of vocabulary that is required to speak a language at a highly fluent level is staggering when you think about it. I can thumb through a Vietnamese dictionary, wondering how I can ever stuff so much information in my head and retain it. Yet, I can thumb through an English dictionary and very rarely come across a word I am not familiar with.

Vietnamese is a tonal language. There are six tones if you include the non-inflected neutral tone (called thanh ngang). As tonal languages go, that’s a lot of tones. Fortunately, Vietnamese comes in two major dialects; Northern and Southern. The Southern variant is the one I am learning, and two of the tones are combined which means that I technically only have to master five. That’s plenty. The ironic thing here is that the tones don’t bother me. Getting my voice used to the up-down song of the language has taken a little time, but I can hear the tones easily. I suppose that my many years as a musician are paying off in a way that I did not foresee.

The Vietnamese language has a Romanized alphabet, which was given to the Vietnamese people by a French missionary some time in the 1500s, I believe. Sort of a Vietnamese St. Cyril. I initially thought that this would make things easier, but alas, I was wrong. In some ways it makes things worse because the Roman letters given to the language need to be heard through a French ear to make sense. It seems as if it would have almost been easier to try to learn to read this language in its original Asian script. At least then I would not continually forget to pronounce the letter “d” like an English speaker instead of the “y” sound that it actually represents. (By the way, the actual “d” sound in Vietnamese is denoted by the letter “đ”. To make things worse, there are something like 13 vowels in Vietnamese. In addition to our old friends a, e, i, o, u, and y, we also have ă, â, ê, ô, ư, and ơ. I won’t even get into how those bad boys are pronounced. Most of them involve accidental discharges of saliva.

When I began language training it occurred to me that I knew absolutely no Vietnamese words outside of the few slang terms I learned from reading James Webb’s “Fields of Fire.” I was literally at zero. It dawned on me that even knowing as little Spanish as I do, I know a LOT more Spanish than I do Vietnamese, even after a month of classes in the latter. It is daunting to jump into something like this without even knowing how to say “yes” or “no.” In fact, I still don’t really know exactly how to say “yes” or “no.” Since Vietnamese is a face-saving culture, there are words that don’t really mean yes or no, but some ambiguous middle ground that allows you to say yes or no without directly saying yes or no. Sort of a “not yes.” Wonderful.

There are very few Western cognates in Vietnamese. The few that I can detect are French, of course. However, the Vietnamese incorporated at least one English word from the period when U.S. forces were in their country. The Vietnamese word for “cafeteria” is “căng tin” (canteen).

Also I am not sure this is a cognate, but it sure as heck ought to be:

Vietnamese for “powerful” is....

“hùng mạnh.”

Indeed.

Slacker

Yes, Dear Reader, I have been somewhat sedentary at the computer for the last several weeks. I was busy shaping U.S. foreign policy.

Not really.

Actually, the truth is that I was temporarily assigned over to the Bureau of Arms Control and International Security, otherwise known as "T". I was a temporary staff assistant during what was a very interesting time in that bureau. I got to experience a Senate confirmation from the bureaucratic sidelines, as well as the transition to the State Department of a new Under Secretary and her staff. It was quite the experience for an entry level officer. After five weeks there, I feel like I learned just enough about the Harry S. Truman building to be dangerous. I'll bet that no other entry level officer with just five months in knows the process for obtaining a parking pass for a reserved spot underneath the building. I'll also wager that no entry level officer knows the process by which artwork can be obtained for a front office! Better yet, I know precisely who to contact if you happen to work on the seventh floor and need to get new carpet installed, have a phone line set up, get a classified email account, who can answer a question about just about any portion of the START treaty, and the shortest route from the number 2 corridor 7th floor to the jogger's entrance. If I am still around 20 years from now I'll be sure to put those little skills to good use, my friends. Or not... To be honest, I cannot see how FSOs do not bite, scratch and claw their way to foreign assignments. To each his own, I guess. I can see how someone could thrive on the atmosphere of the 7th floor, and my time there was certainly enjoyable and valuable, but I am pretty certain that places like Ho Chi Minh City will always be the favored option for me.

Some tidbits-

Questions for the Record for Senate confirmations can make you stay at work very late.

The Foggy Bottom Metro station is not a good place to catch an orange line train at 1700 hours.

After five weeks the selection in the HST cafeteria gets a little, well, yuck.

The occasional goofy question or comment from the floor adds spice to Secretary Clinton's Town Hall meetings. So do the raucous outbursts over Mozilla Firefox. That being said, the Secretary genuinely seems to be having fun. That's good for everyone, I think.

There needs to be a decent bar near the Foggy Bottom Metro station.

Leather soles wear out fast on concrete sidewalks.

Classified web browsing.

Hot dog vendors.

The collective expertise of the arms control advisors in T is mind-staggering.

Free newspapers.

Sifting through cable traffic is tedious.

State generates LOTS of cables.

Subway musicians.

Person at HST you don't want to piss off: the disintegrator guy. Do not mix plastic CDs with paper in burn bags. Put them in separate bags, or Mr. Disintegrator Room Guy will git on you.

Meeting a VIP at the C Street entrance is easier if you know what he looks like. Holding a sign with his name makes you look like a dork.

Five different safe combinations and three different alpha numeric computer passwords can be successfully memorized in short order.

A good sweat will mess up a good suit. Walking around the Rayburn building several times at noon in the summer will produce a good sweat.

Seersucker on Friday!

Friday was my last day at Main State. Like Icarus I fell back to earth on Monday and began what will be 31 weeks of Vietnamese classes. I was a little intimidated at the prospect at first; only speaking English and Vietnamese being a super hard language, but after just three days I have all five tones in my head and can pick them out when I hear them. I think this is the first time since college that I have enjoyed being in a classroom. Besides, how cool is it to get paid to learn an exotic language? Sometime around week 25 check back with me and see if I am still all peace-love-puppy dogs about it. For now I'll enjoy.