doberman pizza. a baha'i (bahai, bahá'í) blog.

Today in our junior youth group here in Hanoi, we studied a lesson in which Rose, a fifteen-year-old girl who is training to be a nurse, travels to a small village by bus to visit her cousin Musonda and her family. The participants—all Vietnamese junior youth of various ages—learned words like “travel”, “arrive”, “greeted”, and so on. It gave me the idea that I should write a little bit more about my own travels of late, especially to and from China, so here’s yet another not-a-travelogue for you all to read.

After returning from Sapa in the mountainous Vietnamese northwest (look for a not-a-travelogue on that trip soon), my fellow travellers and I were greeted by appallingly hot weather back in the ninth level of Hell, uh, I mean the centre of the Earth, uh, I mean Hanoi. Still battling an infuriating air-conditioner cold, I spent the next few days resting up and packing my bags again (more tightly this time) for a nine-day trip through Hong Kong, southern China and Macau.  My schedule was fairly basic: after the flight in from Hanoi, three days in Hong Kong; then a train to Guangzhou, China to spend another three days; then a bus to Macau for another three days, after which I would fly back to Hanoi and settle down for a long nap—or a long quarantine, judging by the H1N1 paranoia. Arrival in Hong Kong greeted us with the odd spectacle of infrared images or ourselves displayed on a coloured screen, allowing security staff to weed out those who were running temperatures of 38 C and above—if your face showed up in oranges and reds, you were fit for the infirmary. (Sneaky H1N1 carriers used fever-reducing drugs to circumvent this system, giving Vietnam its first few cases in June.)

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most of the days since we came back from our trip to Sapa and Lao Cai (which deserves its own blog post) have been cruelly hot and humid, wavering between 35 and 45 degrees Celsius, prompting me to tweet the following message a few days after returning from China: “good morning Hanoi. heat is hovering around 40 C and weaker air conditioners are breaking down, including the one at home. -_-;;” After spending almost thirty years growing up in Canada, I’ve never known an agony like trying to sleep in 40-degree weather (104 F) with no air conditioning. Well, OK, trying to sleep with a kidney stone was definitely worse in terms of agony, but this one’s up there too. I spent something like four days staying with Duyen—one of the Baha’is on the Vietnamese Nat’l Spiritual Assembly—and his family, because they have pretty powerful air conditioning. That’s when I learned about the cultural characteristics of air conditioning. Correct me if I’m wrong, but in Canada, 21 degrees C (~70 F) is considered a comfortable room temperature, right? Not in Vietnam. If I set the air conditioning to 21 C I would get smacked. When I discussed it with him before going to bed, Duyen told me he would usually set the air conditioner to 30 C to be comfortable—which made me go O_O.

Above and beyond mere numerical values, people seem to use air conditioning in a different way here, too. I’ve tried setting air conditioners to 21 C here and what actually happens makes the room seem way too cold. Maybe this is because people use overpowered air conditioners in small rooms, or put the thermostats in odd places. I tried setting the temperature to 24 C for a few nights and found that it was uncomfortably cold. What’s more, the air conditioner didn’t seem to shut off at all, it just kept on blowing cold air into the room as if it was blissfully unaware of the temperature. Where I would expect a comfortable, cool-ish temperature, I feel as if I have to wrap myself up into a blanket to keep from catching a cold. All of this just leads me to ask the question: how in God’s name am I supposed to use the air conditioning here?

Speaking of catching colds, by the way, I learned the hard way that I have to be proactive in dealing with air conditioning here in Vietnam when I caught a cold from sitting in an absolutely frigid air-conditioned Vietnamese coffeeshop around the beginning of the month, which persisted until a few days ago, when I agreed to undergo a traditional Vietnamese herbal steam treatment to cure me of my lingering sniffles. It worked, but not after I dragged a persistent cough and cold through three different countries on a trip through Hong Kong, China and Macau—and this at a time just after the WHO decided to label the H1N1 swine flu crisis a pandemic, triggering automatic quarantine if you so much as cough at a border station.

Since then, I’ve been acutely aware of these wide-mouthed cooling machines lining the ceilings or rising up from the floors, and wary for those that are set to some innocuous temperature like 18 degrees C, but which, in reality, are set to Cirno-style “CRYO-FREEZE WITH ENGLISH BEEF” setting. Sigh. …why do so many things have to be so different here?

Funny how people get so worked up about the passing of entertainers and yet fail to get similarly worked up about people who actually make a palpable difference in the lives of individuals and society. OK, no, I can’t really say that can I. People do remember those who make a difference in our lives—like ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, for example, whose funeral clogged the streets of the city of Haifa with “no less than ten thousand mourners“.

And don’t get me wrong—Thriller was a great album, of course. Just not great enough to change my life. Regardless, “MJ” will be missed and mourned. Good night, sweet prince.

greetings from behind the Great Firewall! At this very moment, I’m coming to you live from the city of Guangzhou, known as the shoe wholesaling capital of China (the world?). there are literally thousands of shops here, all packed into huge buildings and complexes, selling shoes at wholesale prices for buyers that come from just about anywhere in the world. it figures that someone who intensely dislikes shopping for shoes (such as me) would pick a place to go that is internationally famous for selling shoes. isn’t that right? of course it’s right. and that’s okay.

all sarcasm aside, after several months hanging around Vietnam, I’m taking a break for a short trip into China—I figured, why not swing into China for a week since I’m in this part of the world anyway? So I hopped onto a flight from Hanoi to Hong Kong this past Friday, spent a few days hanging around in HK getting hawked by Indian tailors, and just yesterday grabbed a train up the Pearl River to Guangzhou, one of China’s bustling commercial cities. I… don’t know how I feel about China yet. I haven’t been here long enough, and I’m still under the shock of arrival. The first thing I noticed is that I can’t read any of the signs, since they’re all in Chinese (duh). Since I’m visiting a friend while I’m here, I got him to teach me some of the more common Chinese characters, and now at least I know the difference between, say, the Heavenly Cloud Five Gold Shop and the regular Five Gold Shop. (????) I managed to at least buy a bottle of cola and get back some change in Chinese yuan, which is something.

uh, so yeah, shoes. right now I’m in the downtown part of Guangzhou, which is stuffed to the cracks with shoes, shoes spilling out of every street corner basically. they’re gathered here from many different factories in the area and in China as a whole, shown to international buyers, and shipped off by the crateful to shoe stores in Canada, Japan, America, Australia, wherever, you name it. I’m not especially knowledgeable about wholesaleing but these people seem to have gotten it down to an exact science, or rather, made it into a bustling national enterprise. No wonder China’s economy is doing so well. It’s just too bad I’m not so crazy about shoes—if they were wholesaleing, say, smurfs or something that’d be pretty awesome. I’d pay to visit a smurf wholesaler. there must be one in China, I can feel it. Smurf City, here I come.