2) The city

3) The Independece Palace

4) TET 2007, Nguyen Hue and the Year of the Pig

5) TET 2007, Year of the Pig

6) Con Dao

7) Public Holiday

Helemts on sale

9) Sunset over HCMC

10) Phu Quoc

11) Marble Mountain

12) Hoi An

13) Hoi An

14) Hoi An

15) Xe Om in Mui Ne

16) Dalat market street

17) Nha Trang

18) At home

19) Fishing Boats, Mui Ne

20) Beach Street

Through an arrangement with a friend, Dai was adopted by a French family. Here they are, in HCMC, visiting Chi’s house. Right is Chi’s mother, left her Aunt who cared for Dai through the first year.

Chi’s mother insisted that no money was involved, the only condition was that the families stay in touch, which they have done without fail over the years, sending photos, letters, cards and emails. The pain of such a decision was tempered by the knowledge that Dai was being bought up in a happy family, getting a good education and enjoying all the things he wouldn’t have had in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, Chi and her mother lived together. Chi revealed to me only yesterday that her mother had seriously considered a similar fate for her, but in the end decided against it. By Grade 6, Chi was shopping at the market and preparing basic meals for herself and her mother. By the middle of Grade 8, she was working at the Saigon Horse Racing track selling tickets at weekends.

Over in France Jean-Baptiste (Dai) was continuing his growth and education.

First day at school…

Today Jean-B is a strapping 15 years old and doing well at school. Chi is so immensely proud she is fit to burst.

A week today, Chi and I will fly to Paris. After three nights wandering the streets and savouring the atmosphere we will catch a train three hours south east to the town of Besancon. Here Chi will be reunited with her brother for the first time since he left Vietnam as a one year old baby. Discussion of this event is already banned in our house for fear of the waterworks starting. It will be an emotional few days for us when we drive to stay in Gex, the hometown of JB and family, up in the mountains of the Jura region just a few kilometers from Geneva.

For Chi especially, I hope this is the start of a great relationship with her brother and his wonderful family — the heartbreak she feels from what happened will I hope in some way be forgotten as they meet for the first time as adults. . The events 15 years ago shaped Chi’s entire life and personality — and all she wants most of all is a happy family. It’s something she has missed out on for so long.

03:00 – Power cut. Fan whirs to a halt and I have an hour of mopping sweat from my chest before passing out.

06:20 – Awakened with a startle and then a groan of realisation. The guys who do that mental drumming with dragon dancing, they practice on the other side of the canal, just outside our apartments. Just a combination of bass drum, cymbal and other percussion being slammed, smacked and bashed as hard as possible in something resembling a rhythm. But it’s 6.20. They do that for an hour.

07:30 – Pour out my bowl of cereal and observe the ants come streaming out of it. Damn it! Left the box on the fridge again. The only ant proof place in the apartment is deep inside the refrigerator.

09:00 – Yoga. Morning class with Japanese housewives. Get a damn good sweat on and feel great for the rest of the day.

11:00 – Get a haircut. Have a weird conversation with the hairdresser (as usual) where I just smile and nod at whatever he says even though I understand about 25% of what he is saying. Nice bloke.

11:30 – Go shopping at the supermarket in tax plaza.

12:00 – At home watching the repeat of the 4^th round of the US open.

14:30 – Head to the bank. Here I have to transfer money to my account in the UK. I’ve already been sent away once to retrieve my labour contract. Now I am armed with the evidence – contract, pay stubs, red invoices, passport etc. A nice lady is trying to help me but bless her she is so scared of not getting the paperwork right. She asks me for a document (needs to be stamped – by who, doesn’t matter, but a stamp means it is real) that shows I was paid in cash. I cringe, and say I have more then enough here. Chi starts to lose patience. The nice woman takes the details to a guy in a white shirt at a desk two feet behind her, I’d say branch deputy manager. He seems to OK it after 5 minutes with her umming and aaarrring over my contract. By this point I have told Chi to calm down and let me deal with them. This simple piece of personal business is as usual turning into a catastrophe.

She comes back and I’m in. That is until the papers get put onto the desk of a big fat guy in a blue shirt at another desk but right in the middle of the bank, I am presuming he is the manager (and white shirt at the next desk one day aspires to sit at the desk in the middle). I can tell he is a class A ***** just from looking at him. Seen it all before. He grabs the papers and starts making a fuss. He knows I’m watching him. It’s all for show. He tells the poor flustered woman that they can’t buy sterling today. She tells me. I tell her whilst tapping loudly on the perspex and pointing over at fatso ‘I want to speak to him’. He sees this and begins to look worried. She says he is trying to get sterling from other banks. Ahem. OK….so he plays around on the phone and after 5 minutes of pretending to phone people he grunts out ‘OK’ and gives her the thumbs up. He leans back thinking smugly ‘ha I weaseled out of that one well…’…seen The Office anyone?! As the green light is given a man next to me gives me the thumbs up and says bravo. A small victory for the people.

That’s only half the day and I am exhausted. Good night!

]]> http://www.itsthefinalword.com/2008/06/allez-boo/feed/ http://www.itsthefinalword.com/2008/06/getting-married-in-viet-nam/ http://www.itsthefinalword.com/2008/06/getting-married-in-viet-nam/#comments Sat, 07 Jun 2008 10:13:34 +0000 JH http://www.theurbantoilet.com/?p=9 A few days before I left my second home for my third home, if that makes sense, I spent an afternoon with Chi sorting out all the paperwork for our marriage certificate. I’ve already had a Notice of Marriage posted in British embassy for 21 days. If the NOM survives this amount of time without anyone objecting, which it did, you collect the CNI (Certificate of No Impediment). In other words, I got the green light from the British to get married. Well thanks. And thanks for making me pay over 2m VND (60 quid) for the privilage as well…..then of course they had to be certified by the Vietnamese Office of Foriegn Relations (another 320,000 VND). Also had to get 3 copies of my passport and visa certified, at ‘Public Office No 1′ on Pasteur. Thankfully that was quite painless and only cost 4000 VND (10p)………but then we went across the street to a translation service to get my ‘Marriage Application Form’ changed into Vietnamese. 240,000 VND for that. Anyway, you get the idea…..

What I really wanted to talk about was our trip to the hospital. I thought I was required to have a medical, but it seems to depend on where your spouse is from.

Hospitals - nasty

Since Chi is from HCMC, I only had to have the ‘mental’ health check. This was just one of those ‘experiences’ which will stick in my mind. The only other time I’ve been to a Vietnamese hospital was when I got a health check for work permit requirements last year.

I had to sneak this photo as to my left were two more desks, one with the nurse processing documents, and one old guy who was reading a newspaper. His desk was exactly as bland as the one above - “What the hell does he do all day?”I was thinking. It looked like the office had been deserted for 30 years and they’d just come back to work. Once the nurse cleared our paperwork we were waved to the guy at the desk. He took my passport and had a good look at it. He began…”Are you, errrr, hmmm, from Northern Ireland?”. “No”, I replied sincerely, “I am from England”. “Hmm”. More scanning of my passport. “Errrr, are you, umm, still living in London?”. Once again I replied nicely, “No, I am working in Ho Chi Minh City”. This intense physcological profiling continued until he was satisfied that I wasn’t off my rocker. Safe to say, me and the misses both passed with flying colors.

So, we had the dossier of mindless red tape,otherwise known as the marrige application, all ready to hand in. Chi organised everything herself bless her and left me to simply drive around, pick things up, and smile when neccessary. She has been ‘overly generous’ (if you catch my drift) to certian members of officialdom. At the office where all types of registration takes place (births, deaths, marriages etc),located on Pasteur, we once again came face to face with our nemisis desk sucker, name unknown. We’ve been seperated by perspex with this man three times and not once has he made eye contact. He seemed very content with his level of malice which wasn’t just reserved for us but other happy soon-to-be married couples. After shuffling through our well prepared paperwork he throws the folder back at us and writes a list of what we still need to do. I tell him he’s not very helpful, he says “don’t understand”, at which Chi later quipped “doesn’t understand without any money”. Chi beavered for the rest of the day and furnished the folder with its required nonsense, we were then ready for a return to see Mr Happy. This time he had simply run out of things that were missing…..Chi had back-up copies of pretty much anything he could ask for all stamped and translated and notorized ready to shove down his throat if the chance arrived. Reluctantly he processed the application.

I’ve gotten distracted here - what I really wanted to talk about was the interview. As we’re leaving the office Chi says we have an interview scheduled for next week. We both laugh. An interview? To get married! WHAT! OK, whatever, lets play along…then I came across this article today: Vietnam Tightens Regulations On International Marriges

Extract:

Under the decree, within 20 days of the date of the receipt of marriage registration dossiers and fees, the Judicial Department of a city or province must conduct a person-to-person interview with both applicants.
The interview is designed to check whether the two applicants agree to the marriage of their own accord and how much they can communicate

So, hopefully, like the mental health check, we can get through this one as well (ow! that was my tounge in my cheek).

I recently discovered that most people use a company to organise all the documentation for their wedding applications for them. Not Chi, she organised everything herself. Apparently it’s quite tricky…..

We dropped into our favourite public office for our interview yesterday afternoon. The new rules. Firstly, again without eye contact, we were told that we needed to have a translator for me. Would have been nice if Mr Happy had told us that last time, but Mrs Happy informed us through what I can only describe as a forced scowl. So Chi calls up her friend from work and he comes down to the office to help us out. We sit and wait and eventually Chi gets called in. She had a 30 minute grilling - the only thing missing was the bright lamp and windowless room. I won’t go into the details of what he asked but it was all highly personal, and some of it, in my opinion, highly inappropriate. Stopping short of what color my grandfather’s living room is painted, Chi was asked if the people she had invited to her house and travlled to Phu Quoc with over Christmas and New Year in 2005 were really my family - she described her incredulousness to me. Is he serious? I can speak English. I saw them talking together for 2 weeks. I went to Phu Quoc Island with them for 3 days. I saw their passports. He looks exactly like his Dad for GOD SAKE! He then went on to describe to her what would happen if we failed the interview; once again Chi related her feelings to me and it requires some brain-racking to find synonyms for incredulous which I have already used…..ah yes, here we go, flabbergasted, dumbfounded, astonished and thunderstruck. How could we fail? We can communicate. We have no age gap to speak of. We have lots of evidence of our relationship. “Just for example….I have to tell you” he says.

My interview was much more humane, although that may only have been because the office was due to close at 5.00 and I sat down at about 4.30 (we arrived at 2.15). It may also be the norm, and the officials are much more interested in what she knows about me than vice versa. All I know is that this whole process has drilled my better half into the ground and she came out of it a little frazzled and definitely stressed out; it’s a little too premature to be relieved, we find out if the interview was successful on the 7th September.

Here it is in all it’s bureaucratic glory. We’ve finally burst free from the assemblge of red tape which has bound us since April. Although we’ll be celebrating tonight, in our minds it’s not done until the wedding party later in October. However, we are of course very happy to have gotten this over and done with! I feel I had to blank out some personal details because I am petrified of lonely Internet cyberloonies who will stalk me, yes, I’m talking to YOU. It was strange coming out of the office as a legally married man and then heading off back to work as did the misses. We did manage to squeeze in a matrimonial bowl of pho of which I took a picture in a bid to emulate those countless images on drool-worthy food blogs such as Sticky Rice.

Yes, one of the most popular posts from my old blog the final word (in Saigon).

Getting married in a communist country that is still developing is just as much fun as you are probably thinking it is.

I had five post altogether, so it is kind of a series. Here is the link to the links. Yes, I had to do it like this, back in my old school blogger days.

Here is a link : http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7431195.stm : Although I am not sure if it is the same report I saw, I can’t actually get the vid to play from here!

All of a sudden, after years of posturing and confidence and bravado, the wheels are falling off. Banks are unwilling to sell $$$ and the tourist rate is up to 17,500. Stories of construction companies halting work are rife, with cost of materials now too high to make projects worth completing. Government money that was probably earmarked for much needed infrastructure projects around the country — trains, bridges, roads — may now need to be spent on funding vital imports. The situation is the same as in many countries such as India for example, where world oil prices are driving up fuel and food therefore raising the cost of living. In Malaysia the government recently announced it was halting all fuel subsidies, meaning price increases of 40%.

Life is getting tougher for millions of people across Vietnam right now, and possibly this is the time that the facade of development (in my opinion) in this country is exposed. A recent Thanh Nien report debated the validity of the poverty line - calculated at 16% living below the minimum average monthly income per capita of $16.1 in urban areas (http://www.thanhniennews.com/commentaries/?catid=11&newsid=38688). And that is for families. I fail to see how a family living with $17 a month is NOT living in poverty, the other problem as pointed out by TN is that the statistics were calculated for a set 5 year period beginning 2006 and ending in 2010, and not taking into account the rate of inflation! As wages in Vietnam are hardly tied to inflation, obviously the figures are misleading and the real poverty line is higher than 16%. TN constantly declares that foreign investors are not put off by the situation and continue to be attracted to Vietnam, but this has to be a major concern.

So, a spanner in the works of developing Vietnam. As the government tries to control inflation by curbing the growth rate, the hopes of a developed Vietnam may have to wait a few more years yet. 2020 was my magic year for a big improvement..but let’s see what happens in the next couple of years. I am just thankful that I am able to earn a decent salary here and am not directly affected by supermarket/fuel price hikes. Others, ordinary Vietnamese, must well be feeling the pinch.

What with all this baby stuff (by stuff I mean having one), it seems a good a time as any to head home, spend time with family and finally get certified as a teacher. I will start a PGCE in IT at Southampton University in September, and Chi and I will leave Vietnam for Paris on June 30th.

“What about her family?!” I hear you cry — well, Chi’s situation is rather unique, and her story I am planning to write as one of my final posts.

Connections will still be going strong though, no worries there!

I’ll also be starting my own blog based on integrating back into the UK after so long away, address to be announced soon.

Teens have beautified small two-wheelers with glitter and plastic flowers, giant silk butterflies and teddy bears, Christmas tinsel and paper parasols and, yes, feather boas, in an anything-goes creative arms race.

Youngsters have rigged blinking lights, MP3 players and batteries to the frames to blast techno and hip-hop down previously tranquil tree-lined streets, earning them both amused smiles and reproachful looks from their elders.

Source: Thanh Nien

See the story here.

Anyone up in Hanoi witnessed any of this?! Love to see some more pictures. I’ll have my eyes peeled for the first fashion victim down here in HCM!

Whilst not quite my reaction, Chi is pregnant (3 months) and before Christmas (last week of November) we’ll have a baby added to the family. As the weeks go by, my anticipation builds. Brief flashes of what awaits come vividly on occasion, leaving a feeling of disbelief mixed with pure adrenalin. What an adventure this will be…