—————————
JUNE 2020
—————————
[sorry, I wrote so much that now I don’t want to proof-read and edit]
I extended my Vietnam visa entry stamp for another three months, so I’m set here until the end of September. I’m getting to the point where I think I’d like to settle in here for another, I don’t know, year or so. It looks like the U.S. will continue on the Covid roller coaster of closures, openings, safety requests being seen as political, many people not caring, etc… and more related to BLM and social progress - boiling over, violence, etc. (and hopefully some progress that is beneficial long-term).
I haven’t explored options in detail. I think they are:
- Keep going on tourist visa. My visa is through Jan 2021.. Then I can either keep getting 3 month agent/bribe extensions, or if the Laos border is open, do a border run each 3 months (and then with new rules starting this year, I will also have to go to the immigration office each month in Vietnam to basically check in and pay $10, which sounds like it should be pretty easy)
- Get a work permit and TRC (temporary residence card) by actually working. What kind of work? Teaching english is the default white person job here. It seems like in some cases it is as simple as showing up at a school, being, white, and having a passport from the U.S. (or UK, Canada, Australia). I think some schools would arrange the work permit and maybe TRC for me, and some would not. I wouldn’t want to work that much, ideally earn no more than $1000/mo, which would require up to 65 hours per month of work.
- Get a work permit and TRC in less, uhhh, standard ways. Not sure about the details of this but it is possible. Visa agencies and other groups set up or connect with shell companies that will hire someone on paper in order to get them the permit and TRC. But sometimes the government notices and then the person gets ‘blacklisted’ (asked to leave Vietnam and banned from coming back for some time)
I think the route to go is probably either the first or second one. As long as the borders are closed, I think I’ll be able to keep extending 3 months at a time using an agent, which costs about $100/month. Once the borders open, I could start going to the Laos border once every three months and it’d be cheaper.
I don’t think I’d mind working some, as long as:
- The work doesn’t annoy me too much. (for example, I ain’t gonna spend many extra hours creating lesson plans and grading homework)
- It gets me a legit work permit and TRC
- It doesn’t mess up my U.S. income and taxes..
————————————————
MONEY
————————————————
Spending was a little higher in June because I bought a motorbike. I had rented one for three months because I thought I might leave after that. The new bike is a 2008 Yamaha Jupiter. It’s 135cc or so, and carbureted. It has a 4 speed semi-manual transmission. There is some kind of automatic clutch. So you don’t need to use a clutch lever. The first gear is so low that it pulls, as my girlfriend said “like a bull”. I think that 1st gear is for use on farms, steep hills, or pulling trailers. I bought it for $230 which was a decent price. It has 66k km, and looks like it was driven through bushes at some point (scratches all over the front).
The fuel mileage is miserable for a bike like this, only 27 km/l (66mpg). Before buying it, I looked up mileage ratings for this model, but could only find numbers for the newer versions which have fuel injection. Those are almost double (60km/l).
Perhaps some adjustments to the carb would help. The bike smells like it runs too rich. It also dies at idle after a few seconds when warm. I’m not familiar with carb tuning so IDK if there is an obvious change to help both of these. Does a carb have separate adjustments for air/fuel ratio and idle speed? Would it need a different jet to make it less rich?
Had my first hit of dividend cuts. From SPG and PAG. More to come I’m sure… My strategy as of now for the current and coming economic disaster is to use cash I have to buy more stocks at low prices, keep most/all of my current holdings, and hope that I come out ahead in the end.
Of course I’m nervous that most everything will totally tank and not recover for 10+ years.
———————
Pictures
———————
Here’s another dump of phone pictures from the last month…
At the fan store..
At the paint(?) store. They mixed up some polyurethane for the pallet furniture. By hand. With a really strong solvent. No gloves or anything. I wonder if this poor lady has cancer yet.
Started getting juice/smoothies pretty regularly.
Here’s an example of how simple transportation is in Vietnam. Things are basically set up for scooter/motorbike use. This is the beach. You can just drive up and park right by it. From the road to the beach in like 20 seconds.
A lunch of delivered food at home with the girl. See her feet are wet. It’s a Vietnamese thing. You rinse your feet off when you get home. And, you eat sitting on the floor.
There are four unique bridges one after the other on this river. This one is made like a long dragon. Each Saturday evening at 8:00 there is a display at the head of the dragon. Fire balls shoot out of the mouth. Then water. I finally saw it last weekend and, given that there were like a thousand people gathered to watch, the fire and water were quite small and underwhelming.
OHHHHH, Look at that!
I’ve only explored outside the city a little bit. I should more. I will some time. I do plan to go to Hanoi with the girlfriend for about a week in June. She’s going up there to drop her kids off with her mom for a while during their summer break. So I’ll go up to and meet her when she gets back to Hanoi. There are a few interesting places that I’m looking forward to going to (the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, and the house where he lived. Seems he was also a minimalist and like simplicity…. or, perhaps, wanted to set a good example and not live an overly luxurious life..
I now have a routine of going out for coffee every single day. There are seriously so many coffee shops in Da Nang that maybe all the population could inside coffee shops at one moment. There are new coffee shops opening continually (and probably closing. One of my favorites, where I became friends with the owner, had to close this month). The coffee quality is interesting. Vietnam grows and exports a HUGE amount of coffee. Most of it is really cheap and poor quality. The traditional coffee here is using low quality robusta beans, and made really strong and extremely bitter. Then they mix it with condensed (and very sugary) milk. As far as coffee goes, it’s horrible. But that’s what people are used to here and they like it. There is some amount of specialty/third-wave coffee here (those are just words to mean “good” coffee).
So, between the eating out, coffee, and juice, I’m living quite luxuriously. I do really miss my old habit of making the coffee myself, including roasting, and I look forward to when I can do that again. I suppose if I really wanted I could probably start roasting here, and make cold brewed or pour-over coffee. I’m not sure about availability of green beans, but I could probably talk some shops into selling me some of theirs.
But, I’m quite sure I’ll keep going out for coffee. I like the change of scenery, getting out of the apartment, and especially the people watching.
The beach gets really busy with locals near sunset. It’s a very wholesome vibe. Now that the borders have been closed for a few months, there are fewer and fewer white people around. I like being in places where there are a bunch of Vietnamese and no other foreigners.
I’ve been reading some books about Vietnamese life, culture, and government. One thing that fascinates me is the concept of neighborhoods (really, sections of neighborhoods, about 50 households) having a “warden”. That warden is a resident there, perhaps chosen by the residents. Usually an old person. They serve a role of both helping the residents, and identifying/stoping/reporting criminals, and encouraging people to live in the ideal Vietnamese ways. In the more old-fashion areas, the Warden goes to the home of each resident like 1-2 times per year. They discuss the ways in which the family wants to improve (there is a list of them). Once the household has achieved enough of these - it’s kind of like the boy scouts - they get some yellow certificate to hang on the wall in their house announcing they are a “cultured/civilized family”. When enough of the houses in the neighborhood are ‘cultured’, the neighborhood gets or claims a ‘cultured neighborhood’ status. Supposedly they put signs at the entrance of the neighborhood announcing it. Most of the ones that I translated are usually more like Socialist/nationalist/patriotic propaganda phrases. If I remember right, this one says something like “The people living for one party, one constitution”.
Something that has stood out to me in the last month - I’ve witnessed a trend of physical abuse/violence. It’s not uncommon for a young cat to hang around at a coffee shop. IDK whether these are ‘shop cats’ or belong to an employee. At one shop, some people were petting a skinny young cat. Then, the young man who had been petting, used his phone to hit the cat in the head. Not super hard, but, it stood out to me.
Then the next week I was having dinner with the girlfriend at a nice chiken/rice restaurant. There was a small dog on a chain. A guy who works at the restaurant became mad at the dog (IDK, maybe it peed in there?). He had lost his cool and was really mad, and was yelling at, hitting, and kicking the dog. The poor little dog was squealing and howling.
Then about a week later, I was walking out of a convenience store. There was a young man and woman sitting at table outside the store, with a guitar. It’s a fairly common place to hang out. As I walked out, the guy (sitting), kicked the girl, who was standing in front of him. He kicked her hard in the stomach. I was pretty stunned. As I walked by, the girl had a really sad look on her face like the was about to break down. We made eye contact for a moment. Then she went inside the store. It seemed like the was friends with the worker inside.
Kids are sometimes violent to each other also. It’s usually like this:
- A group of kids hanging out at the beach
- One kid walks up behind another, jumps in the air, and kicks another kid in the back. Usually he kicks a smaller child.
- The victim gets mad and picks up some sand to throw at the kicker.
The violence here is basically always a bigger person hitting someone smaller than them. It’s not like in the U.S. where, when kids (play)fight, it’s often like one boy vs another, and they’re facing each other, and doing it as willing combatants for fun. Or, I’ve seen a lot of fights of man vs man, where it’s pretty competitive. But here, that doesn’t happen. It’s basically just a bigger person abusing someone smaller.
I don’t see this kind of thing often, but it’s surprising how it happens out in public, in plain view, even at a restaurant by the worker. In the U.S., you generally ‘can’t’ just kick a chained dog or a small woman out in in public like that, or you might have an ass-whooping or an arrest coming. Here, I guess it is more accepted.
I think women are sometimes violent. The old-fashioned ones use sticks to hit a dog or their children. But I think that happens mostly out of view.
The girlfriend doing a little prayer/ceremony for her new house.
Last night I saw a HUGE spider in her house. I’d seen one like that in there before.. She explained that it lives there and already did before she moved in. So she lets it be. There was a fairly similar situation with a mouse that came up from a hole that a water pipe goes through. She has a much more respectful view of animals and space ownership. In the U.S., the thought of any animal inside ones home is more like “Fuck you, this is MY house. Get out! DIE!”.
There were some cockroaches and ants in there at some point, and she got some kind of grapefruit oil to spray so cockroaches and ants would go away. She said she sprayed some of it on the spider. Then the spider was drunk/poisoned and acted strange for a while, and now it moves around more slowly than before. I asked her why she sprayed the spider, since she decided to live in harmony with it. She said it was like a prank. Now she feels guilty about it and wonders if she might have caused bad karma.
More juice
More coffee. This day, when I was about halfway done with my coffee, they gave me another bottle. I tried to say “you already gave me my coffee” but they wanted to give me another. I don’t know why. Maybe as a gift. Maybe to make me like the place more. Maybe because I am a white guy and was sitting outside, which might attract more customers(?).
See the small chairs? They’re about 1 foot (30cm) tall. That’s common here. At times it is annoying because I have long legs, and getting my legs and feet in place under a table can be like a yoga puzzle. The ones in this picture are nice because I can put two chairs right against each other and sit on both. My body/butt is not super wide, but it’s better because chairs can be so small here.
Girlfriend made dinner for me one night. I took this before she brought the rice, sauce, and asparagus. She’s really caring and helpful and likes to do things like cook for me… help me find something I need to buy… when I don’t sleep well, brings me tea that is supposed to help… offers to sew my pants that need repair… makes me a smoothie… gives me a massage.. things like that. It’s more common for Asian women to be like this than westerners, though they are definitely not all this way. Some women I meet describe themselves as lazy, say they never cook, etc.
I had a hell of a time trying to translate this one. A guy at the coffee shop I’m in tells me it says “there is nothing better than freedom"
Most of the shops that do have specialty coffee also look trendy. So inside those shops there is a steady steam of 18-25 year old girls in groups. They buy coffee, drink 0-50% of it, then spend an hour taking pictures of each other with their phones. They have a lot of experience in posing for their pictures.
try long legs *and* weighing a lot