(Many of you will no doubt find the following post pointless.  But many people seem to like when I post this sort of stuff.  Feel free to skip it if it ain’t your cup o’ joe.)

It’s been a week of ups and downs for me, probably more downs than ups.

It was, for starters, the week that we lost two giants of music – Etta James and Johnny Otis.  It was also the week that the feds shut down file sharing site Megaupload.  It’s estimated that this site earned US$175 million in revenue over the past six years and the reported lifestyle of its founder, Kim Dotcom, certainly would seem to support that.  (What’s funny is that the SCMP insists on calling Dotcom a “Hong Kong man” despite the fact that he was born in Germany and essentially bought his New Zealand citizenship (which is where he was arrested) because he did live in Hong Kong for awhile, apparently in a suite at the Grand Hyatt.  How odd that the media is so strenuously trying to claim this guy as one of our own.)  New Zealand police, cooperating with the US, apparently not only raided his house but had to break their way into the armored safe room somewhere in the house where he was hiding.

I haven’t been feeling very well for quite some time but was just letting it go by.  I don’t want to be labeled a hypochondriac and as a result I tend to not go to doctors unless I’ve been shot or lost a limb.  Then we watched this movie, 50/50.  It’s writer Will Reiser’s semi-auto-biographical work about a 27 year old guy who comes down with cancer and how his best friend supports him through it and how he reconciles with his mother, blah blah blah.  Actually, it’s not great but it’s quite okay.  It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the cancer victim, Seth Rogen as his best friend, Anjelica Huston as his mom, Anna Kendrick as his shrink, Philip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer as a couple of other cancer patients.

The thing is that JGL discovers he has cancer because he has this persistent back ache, so he goes to the doctor, gets an MRI, discovers he has this rare form of cancer on his spine.  I watched it and thought to myself, “Hmmm, I would never go to a doctor for that!”  And then I thought about the way I’d been feeling lately (and the fact that despite the best of intentions I remain a heavy smoker) and went to the doctor.  Maybe this does make me a hypochondriac after all.  I then had a few days of extreme nervousness and lack of sleep waiting for the results.  In the end, it was nowhere near as bad as I was dreading.  No cancer but something that I used to have has returned.  Actually, back when I had it, there was no Wikipedia so I couldn’t read up on it, now I can and I see it’s something that once you have, you pretty much have it for the rest of your life (and no, it’s not an STD).   At least now I know and I know how to deal with it and I expect certain things to improve relative to the good ol’ “quality of life” thing.  So I have that.  But I now also have a lot more tests to undergo and weekly doctor visits for the foreseeable future.

Without going into a hell of a lot of details, I’ve been seriously considering buying something in the Philippines – a flat or a house or something.  I’m not sure what and I’m not sure where.  Do I want to stay in the big city, which means Manila, which probably means Fort Bonfacio since that’s my favorite part of Manila?  Do I want to look a couple or a few hours away from Manila?  (I didn’t much care for Clark/Angeles, haven’t been to Subic.)  On an island like Boracay – a place I really like but a pain in the balls to get to and from since you have to take a boat to get to the nearest airport?  Some other island or beach that I’ve never been to?  I’m planning a trip there in March, in part to take a bit of a look around.

Of course, it’s now Chinese New Year.  Last night we went over to the malls at Hang Hau for dinner.  Around 9 PM, much as expected, most of the shopping mall was empty.  However Taste, a vaguely upscale supermarket owned by Park & Shop, was packed.  People were going pretty crazy buying the sorts of things that Hong Kong people buy in anticipation of CNY – presents to give when visiting family & friends, food & drink for when friends & family come to visit them.  There were huge stacks everywhere of deluxe gift boxes of chocolate, cookies, cakes (yeah, I know, how did I manage to go out without a camera? just my mood relative to my health I guess).  What struck me as odd about this is that most of the stuff being bought seems to have been boxes of western sweets – things that most HKer’s don’t really go for.  (Krispy Kreme lasted just a year in Hong Kong because local people found it way too sweet.)  Gift boxes that contained Cadbury Chocolates and Pepperidge Farm Cookies?  And some of these people were buying like 10, 20, 30 boxes of this stuff.  Gift cases that contained XO sauce and other Asian sauces seemed to make more sense to me.  The wine section was packed with people – probably in no small part thanks to a sale, buy 6 bottles and get an extra 15% off.  Yes, I was planning on buying 1 or 2 bottles and I bought 6.  Anyway, 10 PM Saturday night, every register open, lines 10 deep at each register, each person with a shopping cart stacked up to the ceiling.

Also traditional for Chinese New Year in Hong Kong – shit weather.  The skies are grey, the clouds are low, the temperature has dropped.  It’s 11 degrees in Sai Kung and that’s probably where it’s going to stay for the next 3 or 4 days.  Thanks to the visit to Taste and a delivery from The Porterhouse, there’s plenty of food in the house.  Then I had this idea – that I could speed up the performance of iTunes on my PC if I moved the drives (two drives, RAID 1) from an external USB box to the inside of my PC.  So I figured, okay, move those two 2 Terabyte drives and then buy some new ones to shove into the soon-to-be-empty external RAID box.

So I put the two drives into the computer, booted up, checked the BIOS, made sure they were set up as RAID1, all good.  And put two new drives into the RAID box, booted up, brought up disk manager, formatted the drives, or so I thought.

Because what actually happened is that when I put the drives into my computer, some resource conflict blew out my USB 3.0 ports.  And what I thought was the new disks was actually old disks sitting in another external box that I had inadvertently left powered up and for some reason the computer decided these were new disks.  So I reformatted hard disks that contained close to 2 Terabytes worth of MP3 files.  And not just any MP3 files.  This was the A-J section of my collection.  Just losing the B’s alone would be a disaster – every noise the Beatles ever made down to belches and farts; every wheeze that came out of Bob Dylan’s nose, every Bruce Springsteen concert and outtake from the 1970s.  Because this stuff was stored RAID1, I didn’t bother backing it up to Backblaze.  Because this was RAID1, when I reformatted one disk, I reformatted both disks.

The only thing that saved me was the fact that after mistakenly reformatting these disks, I hadn’t done anything else to them.  Which means they’re recoverable.  I tried out a few different bits of software, finally went with one that was recommended to me via Twitter, GetDataBack. As promised, it is able to not just recover the files, it can recover the long names and the directory structures as well.  It allowed me to run the discovery process against the drive (which took ten hours) before deciding whether or not to buy it, so that I could evaluate how successful it was going to be first.  It looks as if 100% can be recovered and it’s now in the process of copying the files from the accidentally reformatted drive to a new drive.  One file at a time.  I think it’s going to take a couple of days to complete this.  I’m spot checking and the files are there and they can be played but it looks as if all the tags have disappeared.

They say (whoever they are) that the third Monday of January is the most depressing day of the year.  Something about post-holiday blahs and, I’m guessing, usually pretty shitty weather (in the Northern hemisphere at least).  I don’t know if they’re right.

There’s no shortage of songs written about Monday.  Blue Monday.  Stormy Monday. I Don’t Like Mondays.  Monday, Monday.  Manic Monday.  Rainy Days and Mondays.  (Of course there was also a band called Happy Mondays, a damned good band at that, and I guess their name was meant sarcastically.)

Sweet Tuesday Morning.  Tuesday’s Dead. Tuesday’s Gone. Tuesday Afternoon.  Ruby Tuesday.

Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting. Wednesday Week. Wednesday Morning 3 AM.

Thursday’s Child.  (Thursday) Here’s Why I Did Not Go to Work Today. The group Sweet Thursday that featured Nicky Hopkins.

Friday I’m in Love. Friday On My Mind. Love You Till Friday. Black Friday.

Saturday Night. Met You on a Saturday. One More Saturday Night. Saturday in the Park. 10:15 Saturday Night. Almost Saturday Night. Drive In Saturday. Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting. Saturday Afternoon. Treat Me Like a Saturday Night. Book of Saturday. Saturday Come Slow. The Saturday Kids. Baron Saturday. Looking For the Heart of Saturday Night. Saturday Night in the City of the Dead.

Just Another Sunday. Sunday Girl. Sunday Sunday. Blue Sunday. Sunday’s Best. Sunday Kind of Love.  Young Girl Sunday Blues. Sunday Morning Coming Down. My Sunday Feeling. Sunday Papers. Sunday Bloody Sunday. I Met Him on a Sunday. Pleasant Valley Sunday. Lazy Sunday. Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon. Sunday Street. Sunday Will Never Be the Same. Everyday is Like Sunday.

And many more.

All’s I’m saying is I’m feeling pretty crappy for a Tuesday.

Nha Trang is pitched as the top beach resort town in Vietnam.  It’s a 50 minute flight from Saigon and we decided to give it a try.  Unfortunately, we never had beach weather the entire time we were there but I found this laid back town so charming that I could easily have spent another week there waiting for the sky to turn blue.  While the beach may not be the kind of pristine white sand that you’d find in Boracay, it’s very well maintained, including a narrow strip of park that runs along the entire length, several kilometers of outdoor art, sculpted trees and bushes, peaceful places to sit.

The tourist section of the town stretches back for two blocks from the beach and is filled with travel agents, salons, t-shirt shops, restaurants and bars that are clearly aimed at a foreign crowd.  Aside from the selection of western restaurants, all of the Vietnamese ones had large sections of western food on their menus.  There’s a very small night market and a lot of outdoor coffee shops as well.  Russians clearly make up a large percentage of tourists here and you’ll see signs and menus in Russian as well as encountering plenty of Vietnamese who appear to be fluent in Russian.  There are some islands right off the shore including one that has a resort and theme park called Vinpearl which can be reached by boat or by cable car.  I decided to give it a pass.

Our first day and night was spent walking around this touristy part of town.  For our second day, with the skies still gray, we did a spa day.  There’s a famous spa just outside of town.  We decided to live it up so we went for a VIP package for two.  This included a private room (with bed, double-sized jacuzzi, TV and other amenities), a swim in their hot springs pool, mud baths, herbal jacuzzi, 90 minutes massage, a host of salon options, lunch, transport to and from the hotel – all of which came out to about US$150 for the two of us and we were there for about 6 hours.

The drive to and from the spa gave us an idea of the rest of the town and on the third day we decided to explore some of that area.  We started with the Po Nagar Towers, which date back to the 8th century.  If you’ve been to Angkor Wat, this ain’t much – but it’s okay enough I suppose.

You do get a great view of the city from here.

We went walking in search of food, preferably banh mi, but we came to this corner place selling Banh Xeo – Vietnamese crepes or pancakes, in this case stuffed with fresh squid and veggies, with lots of greens served on the side of course.

Walking a bit more, we came upon a place where they were charcoal grilling pork chops in the street.  They smelled so good, we couldn’t resist.

A bit more walking and we came upon two small temples, side by side.  I went into the courtyard of each to take pictures.  At the second one, they motioned for me to wait while someone ran around to the back and opened up the temple so I could see inside.

Meanwhile my gf found this cart where a woman was putting pieces of banana into sticky rice, wrapping the whole thing up in banana leaves, grilling it and serving the result with condensed milk.  Yum.

Just US$1 and seriously nice.  After that, we went to one of the town’s two main markets, Dam Market.

Some shopping and, yeah, some more eating, at this very tourist-friendly banh mi cart that let you mix and match from more than a dozen different kinds of meat and sausage:

Dinner (yes, we had room for more food!) our last night in town was around this area:

I really enjoyed Nha Trang and would gladly return.  I’ll leave you with some photos of some of the people we encountered there:

I’m sorry, I can’t resist posting this.

My mom said she wanted a case for her Kindle 3 that comes with a built-in stand so she could stand it up to read while eating.  I sent her some links from Amazon to show the options and she chose one and I ordered it for her.  A few days later she received it and told me it was no good because it “has an unremovable band about 1 1/2 inches down the kindle which interferes with reading … so what should I do.”   Here’s Amazon’s picture of the case:

Yeah.

To be fair, she did eventually work it out on her own.  Well, she is 90.

Oops!  I forgot to post the photos from the evening of our third day there.  It was Christmas Eve and unlike any I’ve ever spent.

We came to the night market that sets up around Ben Thanh market once it closes at 6 PM.  While they were getting set up, we found this little street corner place to have some seriously good Bun Bo Hue – the spicy beef noodle soup from Vietnam’s heartland:

Walking around and shopping, I saw that the streets were getting seriously crowded.

But before we could join the throngs, I saw this and knew I wanted to try it:

No, no, sorry, I meant this:

It was red snapper, it cost around US$5, and it was possibly the best fish I ever had outside of Japan.

After dinner, we joined the throngs walking down Le Loi and Dong Khoi Streets.  It seemed as if everyone in the city was out on the streets celebrating the holiday.  It was pure exhilaration!  Here’s a selection of photos that I hope convey what we were in the middle of:

Does the world even know that this is what Saigon is like now?  I had no idea!  Does Saigon know how to party? YES!

We began our day at Nhu Lan.  There are some who will tell you it’s not a healthy option to get your banh mi from street carts – I don’t believe it.  However, this place is reputed to have some of the best banh mi in town and after eating there, I can’t disagree.  I’m told the place is open 24 hours.  There are a range of carts and counters around the restaurant.  Pick up what you like from a cart and grab a seat or go inside and order from a decent-length menu.

Here’s the counter with the banh mi selection:

Yeah, unlike the street carts, these are already made.  But they’re made fresh that day and go fast so I don’t believe freshness will be an issue.  Here’s where they’re assembled:

Hey, have you ever seen ham like this:

This is for something called banh mi thit nuong and of course we had to try this too.  Wow!  Intense pork goodness.

After breakfast, we went up to the Sky Deck on the 49th floor of the Saigon Financial Tower.

They charge you just under US$10 per person to ride the elevators up to the 49th floor.  You don’t get to go outside on that deck but you can walk a 360 degree circle around the building for unmatched views of Saigon.  Sadly it was a hazy day (and also the windows were not that clean).  Here are some of the views you get, starting with an aerial view of the Ben Thanh market:

After that, walking around, we grabbed some of this waffle-y thing as a snack – not to be missed.

More walking, more people watching.

And speaking of great views and people watching, I can’t resist posting this photo of a cop enjoying the view of my gf walking down the street:

The famous whatchamacallit building:

For lunch we went to one of the many branches of local fast food chain Pho 24.  In a country obsessed with pho, this place gets it right:

However my gf opted for broken rice served with 3 kinds of pork, which tasted better than it looked:

There were lots of charming looking restaurants around here but when it was time for dinner, I knew we had to go check out Quan An Ngon on Pasteur Street.  They’ve brought in former street vendors into this beautiful upscale setting:

This prawn dish (I forget the name) was very nice:

Bun Cha Ha Noi was tasty but unfortunately paled next to my memories of eating bun cha on the streets of Hanoi:

It was our third dish that was the real winner – Cha Ca La Vong.  I know it sounds like the name of a stripper but it was actually one of the tastiest fish dishes I’ve ever had.

Cooked table-side, it comes with this assortment of sides:

Our waitress very kindly showed us how to assemble all of this for maximum effect:

And all I can say is, Holy Buddha was this good!  As that Makansutra guy down in Singapore says, “Die! Die! Must try!”

The really cool thing about this restaurant is that you can walk around the sides of the place watching all of the food being prepared:

It just adds to the enjoyment.

And that was it for us for Saigon.  We had to be up at 5 the next morning for our flight to Saigon, so it was back to the hotel to pack and get to sleep early.

Coming soon, photos from our 4 days in Nha Trang.

The Cu Chi Tunnels are one of the major tourist attractions in the Saigon area.  It’s a series of tunnels used by the Viet Cong for staging guerrilla attacks against the American and South Vietnamese armies during the war.  There are lots of ways to get there – we chose a tour company called Saigon River Express because a boat ride up the Saigon River seemed like a more interesting journey than sitting in a bus or a van.  It costs a lot more (US$69 per person, including a buffet lunch served on the boat on the way back to Saigon vs. an average of US$25 for a bus tour).  Is it worth the extra money?  That’s a matter of opinion – mine is that the boat ride was more interesting than the tunnels.  Here’s a  sampling of shots that I took along the river.

As for the tour of the tunnels themselves, a lot of it was basically standing around staring at holes in the ground.

And we got to crawl through a tunnel – specially widened for fat-assed western tourists! – and get a splendid view of this:

In all seriousness, it’s actually a pretty good history lesson and one can only marvel at some of the ingenious ways that they did this – digging a massive series of tunnels in an area constantly patrolled by the enemy, 16,000 people living down there – though there is a certain amount of “here’s another thing we came up with to maim and kill Americans.”  Which if nothing else helps you understand their perspective.  As the only American in our tour group, it seemed as if each time our guide would tell us something like, “and then the tunnel would narrow and the fat Americans would get stuck and we could come up behind them and shove a bamboo spear up their butt,” he’d glance over at me looking perhaps a little bit apologetic.

Actually, I felt more than a little weird hearing these descriptions and then seeing a film by “Liberation Studios” filled with archival footage of brave 14 year old village girls leaping out of a tunnel to kill another American.  I may have been against the war but I certainly wasn’t against the Americans who fought and died in the war.  And so as much I was against the war, I felt more than a little twinge in my chest about the whole thing.

Well, the lunch on the return boat ride was nice.

Our second day started at the breakfast buffet at the hotel and as boring as that may sound, the Intercontinental did manage to fit in some of the local cuisine alongside the usual suspects, so I could have both banh mi and pho for breakfast.  And then we hit the streets, roaming around for several hours.  First was Saigon’s beautiful central Post Office, simply because it was the closest to the hotel. Outside, several couples were posing for their wedding photos.

Inside the post office, these school kids were all quietly waiting on line for Santa to help them to mail their letters to the North Pole.  (Notice that the North Pole is considered “domestic mail” in Vietnam.)

Uncle Ho watched and approved.

Next stop was Saigon’s Notre Dame and the statue in front, which was said to be actually weeping in 2005 (the year I was there last – coincidence?).

Inside and out, its architecture isn’t particularly notable, but it’s there and it’s nice enough.

As you walk around Saigon, at any time of day, no matter where you look, people are eating.  And why not?  The food is outrageously good and the prices are ridiculously cheap.

Here’s Saigon’s lovely opera house.

One of the biggest changes since my previous visit is the very visible arrival of the global luxury brands.

Walking around Saigon’s District 1, you can still see some of the old …

… but it’s slowly getting replaced by the new.

(The big building there is Le Dong Tho aka The Financial Tower.  The next day we would go up to that big Sky Deck thing.)

We continued walking, finding both modern shopping malls and older street markets.

Evidence of the old and new everywhere …

For lunch, we stopped at Ngon 138, a lovely restaurant with plenty of outdoor seating.

We started with banh tom ho tay (basically sweet potato fries topped with shrimp).

Next was ban xeo, the famous Vietnamese crepe, here much larger than the street version, filled with prawns and sprouts.

Last dish was bun thit nuong – a bowl of cold vermicelli topped with grilled pork and fried spring rolls.

As you would expect, every dish was served with a huge assortment of greens. The cost of this meal, including iced coffee and a coke, was under US$10.

Of course one of the best things to do in Vietnam is people watching.  For me, this often translated into sitting at the front of a shop while my gf was inside trying on everything.

For these construction workers, finding a shady spot for their lunch break meant hiding under this scaffolding.

Most people on scooters wear these over-sized face masks, at least in part due to rising pollution.

For dinner, I managed to find my way back to Bo Tung Xeo (also known as Luong Son for some reason), a famous and well-loved outdoor restaurant where the specialty is DIY barbecue.  They have a huge menu there that includes some very exotic options.

We didn’t go quite that crazy though.  The best dish we had was some marinated beef:

And then some “wild pork”:

Here they are cooking away …

We followed that up with some barbecued chicken and of course some local 333 beer served with ice.

I don’t recall the price but it was well under US$20.  This place may be listed in every tourist guide but it seemed as if almost everyone there was local families and, as always in Vietnam, incredibly friendly people.

No night life for us, too tired after lots of walking and eating.  Besides, we’d missed Elvis.

(I’m rewriting the posts from our Vietnam trip so that I can add in photos.)

My one and only previous trip to Vietnam was in 2005 – 4 days in Hanoi and 4 days in Saigon.  During my stay in Saigon that time, almost everything was closed for Tet (lunar new year).  I liked the place but I didn’t feel as if I’d really been there.  That’s one of the reasons that for this trip I decided to go to Saigon and not Hanoi.

December 22nd – Our trip got off to a great start courtesy of Cathay Pacific and free upgrades to business class.  The plane had their super-old business class seating but really I’m not going to complain about that.  Then a taxi ride into District 1.  We stayed at the Intercontinental Asiana Hotel and it was just fabulous – the room was great, the staff even better.

We were a bit tired but also hungry so we decided to venture out and start to get a feel for the city.  The Diamond department store and shopping mall was close by so we headed in that direction.  It was mobbed with people!  Everyone was taking pictures in front of the Christmas decorations.  The crowd was very young (and very good looking).

Crossing the streets was every bit as anarchic as I’d recalled.

Finally we came upon this brightly lit up place with a large outdoor seating area so decided to grab some food.

Unfortunately once we sat down we discovered that the only Vietnamese food on their menu was the fried spring rolls and the fresh vermicelli rolls.  Fortunately, beer (served with ice) was cheap and it was a comfortable place to sit and let the evening pass by.

After that, we walked around a bit more.  Every street was packed with people posing for photos in front of Christmas decorations.

We got some sort of sticky rice thing from a street vendor to munch on as we walked around and looked at the people.

Eventually we made it back to the hotel and called it a night.

The morning starts with my gf returning from breakfast to tell me that Korean doctor-turned-actor Ken Jeong (Hangover, Community) was in the restaurant with his family.  She had gone down without her phone so couldn’t text me to come down or take a picture but she’s sure it was him.

We head off to the Po Nagar Towers, a small hillside temple complex that dates back to around the year 700.  It’s not as good as it sounds because the small buildings have been restored seemingly by kindergarten students, but you do get a great view of the surrounding area.  While there, we meet a Filipino family – the husband works in HCMC and has brought his family over for Xmas. (There’s a reason I’m mentioning this, just wait.)

The Towers are located well outside of the tourist zone so we go walking in search of food.  First we find a place making banh xeo, those great crispy crepe things, in this case filled with fresh squid.  We get 6, served with a bowl of the ubiquitous sauce and another bowl of greens.  Seriously good.

Walking down the street, someone charcoal grilling very thin pork chops, served with rice and veggies, about US$1.30, they come over to us later with a small plate of grilled prawns and squid, free, they just want us to enjoy.

(Everyone thinks my gf is Vietnamese.  Everyone is talking to her nonstop in Vietnamese.  It’s a little awkward and weird.)

I reach two small temples, each dedicated to Kwan Yin.  At one, they tell me to wait while someone runs around the back and opens up the temple so I can see inside.  Meanwhile my gf takes refuge at the food stand in front where they are grilling banana and sticky rice wrapped in a banana leaf, served with condensed milk.

We walk a little bit further.  I hear someone shout out my gf’s name.  I think to myself, “there’s a word in Vietnamese that sounds like her name?” and then we see it’s the Filipino family we’d met earlier.  They’re having lunch at this little street-side seafood place, eating crab and prawns and all sorts of other stuff.  The husband tells us this is place he eats at every time he comes to Nha Trang.  We figure this must be some sort of sign so we get the restaurant’s card and tell them we will return for dinner.

The sun is finally out so we chill out by the pool for a couple of hours.

Then we head to the Dam Market – not the damned market!  One of two markets in town, this thing sprawls over what I’m sure is at least one square kilometer.  We find  pushcart where they’re making banh mi with your choice of about a dozen different fillings – mix and match – and we do.  And a little place to sit where we can get some coconut to drink.  Dam!  We buy some silk stuff, we walk around, back to the hotel.

So for dinner last night we head back to that little street seafood place.  They’ve got about a dozen different kinds of shellfish on display.  We get a crab and some prawns and my gf also wants lobster – now that her stomach is better and her appetite is back.  Someone jumps on a bike and scoots off to the market to get us one.

The end result is a one kilo lobster (I think larger, actually), a nice big local crab, half a dozen shrimp, fried rice, peanuts, cockles and beer – all for around HK$300 or US$40.  What could be wrong?  Actually, it wasn’t that great.  Everything was simply steamed or boiled, which was a bit boring, but far worse was that the lobster wasn’t cooked long enough and had an odd taste to it.  So this wonderful “find” via our new friends turned out to not be so wonderful after all.

We fly back to Saigon this afternoon, 3 hour layover and then get back to Hong Kong tonight.  Photos to come this weekend.

Even though we didn’t get great weather for most of our stay here, I really enjoyed Nha Trang and would gladly return – just at a different time of year.