In case you’ve ever thought about investing, retiring or spending a long period of time in Vietnam, it would serve you well to click on the headline link below and read the complete ‘Asian Times Online‘ article to become aware of the ACTUAL legal situation in Vietnam.
Vietnam arrests a pragmatist [excerpted from front page section] The arrest last week of prominent attorney Le Cong Dinh on charges of spreading anti-government propaganda has drawn unwanted international scrutiny to Vietnam’s legal system. By penalizing Dinh’s arguments for free expression, including those uttered in court, the state is harassing the whole legal sector and leaving the nation defenseless. – Roby Alampay(Jun 19,’09)
Now ask yourself the questions:
How much/how little has the political landscape REALLY changed in Vietnam since 1975?
Under such a legal system, how much of your capital are you willing to invest and put at risk?
Woke up this morning and my internet connection was down. Tried all the tricks and finally had Mai call the VNPT (from whom I get my internet) and ask them if the internet was up or down in Hue. They said “up”, so Mai told them we were down. When Mai told them that we could not ‘ping’ both Yahoo.com and Google.com, the VNPT support young man told Mai, “Yahoo and Google must be down!”. When Mai asked when they could send someone out they said “Sometime today”.***
At that point, I asked for the telephone and asked, in Vietnamese, for someone who spoke English! As the gentleman got louder, I got louder. Finally, I handed the phone back to Mai, and she said they would have someone out shortly. Within 5 minutes, we had a nice 29 year old young man on our doorstep.
He went into the computer room and tried to fix the connection. Finally he had to call VNPT and verify some settings. After calling several times (they most likely reset the card which controls our connection), we were online again. Read More…
Sitting at a sidewalk cafe in downtown Hue tonight, drinking a beer with a US friend, a young man from Norway came by with a new Canon EOS 50D camera hanging around his neck which he bought in Hong Kong. In Norway it cost over $3,500USD and in Hong Kong it was around $2,300USD with Canon 18-200mm lens (non-pro).
We bought him beer and talked for awhile. He was 20 years old and his first time in Asia. He was traveling with another 19 year old young man from Norway. I commented that he didn’t look Norwegian, and he said he was Colombian and had been adopted when he was 4 years old by a Norwegian couple.
We talked with him awhile — I’ve been traveling to various parts of Asia since 1982 and the gentleman I was with had lived 8 years in Asia. The young man was very nice but knew very little about traveling through Asia. He had is camera dangling and his money belt outside his pants under his t-shirt. Not yet travel-saavy.
He said that he and his young friend had gone into a bar in Hanoi and had two young women sit down beside them and talk with them, bring them fruit and pour their beers. At the end of the evening, the bill was $388.00USD (7,000,000VND).
In Asia, a woman’s company may cost money — always in a bar or nightclub. Men and women do not spend much time together unless it’s for sex. Men interact with men; women with women. Not like in the USA and Europe. Infrequently do men and women go out together. Mainly for funerals and weddings. So, if a woman is friendly especially during the evening, expect to pay at the end of the evening. Read More…
Well, finally made the move to another webhosting company — no more GoDaddy for webhosting. So far, so good — had some problems getting my photo gallery working, but finally solved the problem.
Now I have to upload some new photos to the website. Hopefully, tomorrow. Feedback appreciated.
Somehow, I also lost most of my captions from the photos. UPDATE:Fixed the caption problem. I’m very happy that I’ve finally made the switch in only two days of work to get 98% 100% of the site working. Hip, hip, hooray!
Today, I drove downtown to my Vietnamese friend’s shop and we walked across the street to the Internet cafe so I could show him my work. Didn’t display correctly, probably because the Internet cafe computers only had 512K of memory and the pictures in each post and even more so, the flash-based photo gallery would not load in Internet Explorer [IE]. IE just hung, but I could display a page of ony thumbnail photos.
UPDATE: Also updated the flash components to the newest versions which seem clearer and load faster — maybe will try the internet cafe again.
Tomorrow is Buddha’s Birthday. All of the temples are wonderfully decorated and the parents are buying lanterns for the children to carry in a procession.
Here’s Megan and Win with their red lanterns. No lights, just candles in the lanterns. Tomorrow they both will have a great time with all the neighborhood kids and their lanterns.
Buddha’s Birthday for Buddhists is like Christmas for Christians. Last year there was a parade in Hue and people lined up along the road for 5 miles.
Every even year is a larger celebration, so this year will be more muted than last year.
Children will float lanterns in the Perfume River and there will be big shows at the Pagoda for the next two days.
A few days ago, Megan looked out her window as she was going to bed at 9:30pm that the beautiful flower outside of her window was opening.
No one here seems to know the name of the flower, but it only blooms once a year around midnight. It is extremely fragrant and very intricate. It is a pearl white color with light yellow stamens.
Mai told me that in the ‘olden times’ the Vietnamese men used to sit outside the flower drinking tea and composing poems. (Those days are long gone — I don’t know of any Vietnamese men who compose poems now.) I can understand because the flower has a ’sensuous, haunting and elusive quality to it — especially because it only blooms for one night approximately around midnight.
Clockwise: Mai, Megan, Win, Hoa, Hoai — Mai, her daughter and her sisters all enjoying the uniqueness and fragrance of the ‘Midnight Beauty’ flower.
Yesterday was the hottest day of 2009 in Hue. It will be a bit cooler today due to the weather change — (85F to 90F) and rain today — thank goodness.
I don’t mind the heat until it gets above body temperature — then it’s a bit much — even the walls are hot-to-the-touch. It was 100+F** in my computer room yesterday. Walking up the stone stairway with bare feet and I could feel the heat from the stairway.
To get away from the heat yesterday, I jumped onto the 70cc moto and rode around the countryside taking photos. It was too hot to stay inside — better to have the breeze from moto-ing in the countryside. And having fun making the young ladies giggle and laugh. And taking some interesting photos.
Yesterday, I met a young Dutch couple who rode bicycles to the Thien Mu Pagoda (few kilometers outside of Hue on very level ground). They were both exhausted even though they both rode bicycles everyday in Amsterdam and could easily ride 10+ kilometers when in Europe. They were not aware of how much the heat saps one’s strength and tires one out.
When you come to Vietnam from Northern Europe (or elsewhere) where bicycle riding or walking long distances is common and most people can do quite a few kilometers without giving it much thought — think again before riding or hiking far in the hotter weather of Vietnam, especially if you’ve only been in Vietnam a short period of time.
After being here for awhile, many tourists better understand why people in Mexico and other countries around the equator take naps during the hottest hours of the day.
I usually give myself several weeks to a month (depending on the time of year) to acclimate before doing any strenuous exercise when it is so hot — above 35C or 95F.
** It was 100.3F an hour later, but I didn’t take a photo.
Now I know why many Vietnamese men don’t wear underwear, it’s just too hot.
Note: Combined two separate photos to display both Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures.
I used to dislike most lawyers, possibly due to all those lawyer jokes that makes one laugh. And some of my personal experiences with lawyers have left a lot to be desired, even having been bilked out of several tens of thousands of dollars by an affirmative-action-educated, Harvard-alumni, civil-rights lawyer.
However, come to Vietnam where you have no recourse! When you buy anything, you have to take it like it is. If it’s broken or the batteries don’t work — tough!
If you buy food, you have no way of knowing what kind of pesticides, additives and chemicals have been put on the food — formaldehyde in pho, borax in the meatballs and fertilizer sprinkled on the fish to preserve them longer.
Many people around here are afraid to eat the food because they don’t know what’s in it.
We buy as much as possible ‘locally grown’ and even that’s no guarantee of anything unless we buy from the neighbors.
So many ways the gov’t, corporations and cultures cheats the consuming public:
The Vietnam currency value is artificiality controlled (Vietnamese dong is not traded in any currency market) and is experiencing a 25%+ inflation rate/year, so in 4 years or less, everything will cost twice as much.
Counterfeit goods — they are by far the largest percentage of brand-name items, i.e.Vietnam Gucci, Gap, Nike, etc.
Gov’t taxes everything (maybe more than once) so everything is over-priced relative to it’s poor quality. Computer items are taxed an additional 10% as ‘luxury goods’.
It’s more likely that you will get a counterfeit item than a genuine item (cultural-bias towards dishonesty) and even genuine items are very poorly constructed — 90% could never be sold in the Western nations due to extremely poor quality. Most everything breaks much more quickly than in the West because the quality is so poor.
Sometimes, I tend to believe that all of the above is ‘condoned’ and encouraged as long as the police get a cut of the action. It’s a form of ‘quiet theft‘ of value and quality from the local population.
Excluding the gov’t employees, the Vietnamese work seven days a week. Yet the gov’t/corporations recover most of what people earn from their work; through the above thefts and numerous gov’t/cultural encouraged addictions like smoking and alcohol, especially beer — probably Vietnam’s largest industry.
I received a voice message from the Portland VA several days ago telling me that my ’snail mail’ was being returned to the VA and I had an appointment on April 15th. What to do?
Calling from Vietnam costs $3.00 for the first minute and cheaper thereafter. And being on hold with the VA makes it even more expensive. So I started thinking about a solution.
Just before we left Portland, my VoIP box broke and I started using a ’softphone’, i.e. a software based internet voice-over-IP [VoIP] telephone. So I started it up here, it connected automatically to our telephone number in Portland, I heard a dial-tone so I dialed the VA just like we were in Portland.
When the VA finally answered, it sounded almost like I was next door. A little garble on the receiving side, but quite good for going 1/2 way around the world. Amazing! I even called my brother living near Portland, Maine. Always great to talk with family.
So now, we’re ‘pluged-in’ and I can receive and place calls. Due to the 14 hour time difference, I probably will still have the telephone automatically answer in Portland and send me the voice recording email. Works wonderfully. If I have the softphone running and it rings, I will anwer it, but I don’t keep it on all the time because the internet connection is so slow that if I do anything the connection deteriorates. However, just having a telephone connection to the US is wonderful. If you want to talk with us, just leave me a voice message and I will return your call within 24 hours — probably less.
Megan had a great time drawing a card for me (she was going to do Mai’s card later, but I don’t think she ever got around to it). [UPDATE: Megan made Mai a special card the next day.]
However, she did help Mai bake a double layer coffee cake with custard between the layers and dribbled over the top. It was wonderful — almost everyone in the family came over to enjoy it with us. We had the best cake in town — especially since almost no households have an oven in Vietnam.
Vietnam has lots of sugar now, but only a modest amount of diary products because Vietnam has almost no miking cows. Most of the milk products are imported from Australia — mostly in powered form.
I must say that the vanilla ice cream being produced now in Vietnam is tasty and is wonderful to eat with the cake. It tastes much like US ice cream now.
Not too much to add — Mai & I are still happily married even after 12 years. Neither one of us has any major complaints about the other. We both feel lucky with whom we married.
While I may not be the ‘best catch,’ I’m considerably better than 95%+ of the Vietnamese men. Many are alcoholics and very few treat their wife as wonderful as USA men treat their wife. Traveling abroad really makes an American man aware of how well he treats his wife compared to how poorly women are treated in other cultures. Do we spoil our women in the USA?
Robert Newman has been researching Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart for 15 years, we talk about the Myth, PR campaign and lies surrounding Mozart life. Topics discussed: The Marriage of Figaro, How Robert first stumble upon the discrepancies, suppression of evidence, Maynard Solomon, 25 Symphonies, Enlightenment Thinkers, Voltaire, Russo, Mozart as a musical “Superman.” His father Leopold Mozart, The Mozart Correspondances, Mozart as an Actor, Austria, Joseph the Second, The Illuminati, The Jesuits, Emperor in Vienna, The Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburg’s, 30 000 people in Salzburg were thrown out, the Jesuit connection to Mozart, the 60’s music scene and manipulation, Renaissance, The Wunderkind, The Marriage of Figaro, Ido meneo, Mozart’s sister Maria Anna Mozart, Maria Teresa von Paradise and much more.
Since I don’t speak much Vietnamese, I need something to keep my mind active and Red Ice Creations MP3 Archive provides hours of listening to thought-provoking interviews. I don’t agree with all of them, but I always get something new to think about. More and more, I realize how much our beliefs of reality, history and society (Weltanschauung) have been ‘orchestrated’ by the ‘ueber-elite’. Even the current economic crisis has been ‘orchestrated’.
I even purchased a 3 month member subscription for the Red Ice Creations members section.
Gallery — Use this frequently to view newest albums.
Switches between one or more pages of albums.
Back Group — Moves back a group of pictures.
Back 1 — Moves back 1 picture.
Selects picture to view.
Forward 1 — Moves forward 1 picture.
Forward Group — Moves forward a group of pictures.
Play — Starts the slideshow.
Pause — Pauses the slideshow.
Fullscreen — Switches slideshow in to FULLSCREEN mode.
Wait a moment until the large image is downloaded. Much larger viewable pictures — why I decided to use flash.
ESC — Pressing the ESC key returns to normal mode.
You can also use keystrokes: Click on the picture first (mid-way down on right side) [F]ullscreen [Spacebar] – Start/Stop [N]avigation [G]allery
[< -] Previous [->] Next
Also, place your mouse cursor over any icon under the picture for a few seconds and a tooltip will appear explaining the function of each icon.
Update: Enlarged Slideshow icons 300% — didn’t realize they would appear so large on the blog. Oh well, you don’t need glasses to see the icons .
I’ve also been working hard putting up a flash photo gallery on the site — for weeks. I have two albums uploaded and viewable. Expect more shortly — including a Megan-only album.
Please let me know if you like the pictures. They are a mixture of Mai’s family and the surrounding sights of Hue.
UPDATE: Firefox works! If your flash-based gallery/thumbnails do not work in Firefox, you need to disable some add-ons. Notably, any add-ons which block flash, like ‘FlashBlock’. Feedback/comments appreciated.
UPDATE2: Disabled all Firefox add-ons and then re-enabled the basic add-ons, plus Tor, for anonymous browsing. Everything worked. Then added Ad-block and Flashblock and everything still worked. I don’t quite know what prevented it from working for me in one of my Firefox profiles, but I’m very happy to know that it will normally work in Firefox without any difficulties. Hip, hip, horray!
Since the website is blocked in Vietnam*, I tried changing the main domain name to another domain name which I have to see what happened. Even though the domain name changed, the site remained blocked with tells me that the IP number is what is blocked.
I emailed my hosting company, GoDaddy, and requested a new IP number but was turned down and was told to purchase a dedicated IP number for $2.50/mo. The site runs me around $5.50/mo so it’s hardly worth it. I tried to purchase a 2 month dedicated IP number, but GoDaddy wouldn’t let me purchase it for $5.28. I even tried PayPal which I know works because I just used it last week. To no avail. GoDaddy responds with a non-informational error message, like ‘invalid data’.
I emailed GoDaddy’s support, but their ‘off-shore’ support (probably India) sent me some off-topic, ‘boiler-plate’ responses (after waiting 30+ hours for a reply). All general email support issues seem to be handled ‘off-shore’.
I just read that GoDaddy was blocked by China during the Olympics and possibly at other times also. So part of my problem may be that I’m with a controversial hosting company — which also has poor customer support. Maybe GoDuddy has gotten so big (and so interested in long-legged, busty blondes — spattered all over GoDaddy’s website) that GoDuddy doesn’t have much interest in the ‘little guy’.
I searched the web yesterday and found several hosting companies which have what I want for $4.00/mo. So instead of purchasing a dedicated IP number, it seems more worthwhile to purchase annual contract with a new hosting company. My GoDaddy hosting contract expires in the middle of May, so looks like it’s time to do a Go, Went, Go(ne)Daddy.
* Fascism (masquerading as socialism) has no tolerance for criticism.
This website is a subjective chronicle of what we experience living with the Vietnamese people and government institutions — especially the police, here in Vietnam.
Thus, this website is for people who are thinking of visiting. living or investing in Vietnam and not especially for Vietnamese people themselves.
Recent Photos
Click picture to download original pix.
Click left icon for gallery selection.
Click right icon for FULL screen view.
The arrest last week of prominent attorney Le Cong Dinh on charges of spreading anti-government propaganda has drawn unwanted international scrutiny to Vietnam’s legal system. By penalizing Dinh’s arguments for free expression, including those uttered in court, the state is harassing the whole legal sector and leaving the nation defenseless. – Roby Alampay (Jun 19,’09)
Tomorrow is Buddha’s Birthday. All of the temples are wonderfully decorated and the parents are buying lanterns for the children to carry in a procession.
A few days ago, Megan looked out her window as she was going to bed at 9:30pm that the beautiful flower outside of her window was opening.
Yesterday was the hottest day of 2009 in Hue. It will be a bit cooler today due to the weather change — (85F to 90F) and rain today — thank goodness.
I used to dislike most lawyers, possibly due to all those lawyer jokes that makes one laugh. And some of my personal experiences with lawyers have left a lot to be desired, even having been bilked out of several tens of thousands of dollars by an affirmative-action-educated, Harvard-alumni, civil-rights lawyer.
I received a voice message from the Portland VA several days ago telling me that my ’snail mail’ was being returned to the VA and I had an appointment on April 15th. What to do?
Megan had a great time drawing a card for me (she was going to do Mai’s card later, but I don’t think she ever got around to it). [UPDATE: Megan made Mai a special card the next day.]
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I’ve also been working hard putting up a flash photo gallery on the site — for weeks. I have two albums uploaded and viewable. Expect more shortly — including a Megan-only album.
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