Danny's Weblog

2007 Dec 26 [ Wed ]

Vietnamese tissues not so terrible

When I took a trip to Vietnam I was very snooty about the "Tanpe" pocket tissues available, which seemed to be knockoffs of Tempos: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Asia/Vietnam/Miscellaneous/tissues01.html]

Well, I'm pretty sure the Tempo tissues I've been buying in England have been made by Mr Tempo himself, not stealthily smuggled in from Taiwan (well, not absolutely sure). Yet they have the same major problem as the Tanpe brand: the blue and yellow inks, or pigments, or whatever you'd call them, are applied to the *inside* of the packaging and inevitably rub off while the packet is in your pocket.

Sheesh. I can't remember this problem when I bought Tempo tissues in Germany. Maybe Mr Tempo has been trying to manufacture them in England and that's not a good idea.

2006 Mar 16 [ Thu ]

Our hotel in Saigon -- the Cam hotel on Bui Vien St

The letter "A" in "Cam" actually has a circumflex and a hook tone mark on it.

The address is 40/31 Bui Vien St, Pham Ngu Lao Ward; phone 8372502; email kevinkien@hcm.fpt.vn

I had gathered from the Lonely Planet guide that the Pham Ngu Lao area had a wide choice of tourist accommodation, so rather than trying to book a room before arriving we just went to the area and wandered round. Actually, the bus service we arrived on has its office right on Pham Ngu Lao road, but that wasn't clear when we arrived (I actually went to a bookshop first).

I didn't make a major effort to get the best deal. LP had said ten to twenty dollars was standard. I was looking for a room with AC and a balcony in a quiet area. The first offer, on a busy street, was for I think 22 USD; when I grumbled about the pricve she started talking about a room without a balcony. This may have been just a negotiating tactic but I am wary of windowless rooms in Asia and bade her adieu.

We wandered a little further and found ourselves in an alley off Bui Vien St; at least I think so, as neither map I bought names the alley. Apparently the designation "40/31 Bui Vien St" signifies "house number 31 in the alley off number 40 Bui Vien St".

The alley is wide enough for a moto to pass along, but not really wide enough for even a small car. It is thus much quieter than the main streets. However, the alley is full of minihotels and restaurants.

The term "minihotel" apparently means a converted shophouse, three or four storeys high, with the "lobby" on the ground floor and no elevator, dining area or parking (except for motos, and not necessarily for anyone's moto except the owner's).

Typically there are 3 rooms on each floor: the front, the middle and the rear. The middle room has no window (although I have seen several hotels where there is actually a window installed in that room facing the corridor!). The rear room may have a window, but there is probably no view and no means of escape in the event of a fire.

I did not investigate other rooms. I asked for a balcony room and got one on the first floor (ie the floor above the ground floor). The balcony door opened (although you needed to unlock the padlock) so it was relatively safe in the event of fire.

It was exceptionally clean, apparently having been recently redecorated. The girl quoted 14 USD per night which I accepted without a struggle.

Basically I was quite satisfied with my choice and would recommend it to other travellers (although I did not check out the other rooms and their rates probably vary with the season). In case it might be helpful for other travellers, I list advantages and disadvantages below. People who are more familiar with Vietnam than I am may find some of these remarks applicable to most accommodation there.

Disadvantages

1. Although a phone was provided, the LCD display was messed up and unreadable. I never even tried to use it as I had already found a SIM, but I would worry that it would be flaky.

2. A towel was provided as a bathroom mat (ie specifically left on the floor). I feel a little squeamish about drying myself with something that has been ground into the floor, but I'm probably just weird.

3. There was no real fan in the bathroom. There was a hole in the wall where a fan could be fitted, and nearby was a functional fan which expelled air from the entire room into the corridor. This seems suboptimal, certainly for guests in the middle rooms whose only air supply was from the corridor.

4. The bed had no top sheet. Instead, slightly scratchy thin blankets were provided. When we slept with air conditioning, they were quite itchy.

5. At the entrance to the hotel a rack was provided with many pairs of shoes, and you are expected to remove your shoes before proceeding. This was OK for the Vietnamese, who normally wear sandals or other shoes which are easy to take off and put on, but if you need to sit down to unlace and relace your shoes the only bench was about four meters away, next to the motos. So my feet felt a little scrungy every time I came in. If I remember correctly, there was a dog to worry about too.

It didn't affect me because my Khmer girlfriend kept a close eye on me, but there is a sign in the hotel saying "no guests, no bargirls". I wonder if they actually enforce this? Perhaps it is only there for appearance's sake.

7. The ceiling light in the bedroom had a bare fluorescent with no cover.

8. The AC had a remote – yay – but I really couldn't figure it out – blush. I think when I tried to change the temperature it just said "Low" when you reduced the setting and "High" if you increased it, so there was no way to return to a comfortable temperature once you found it. On the upside, as the compressor unit was outside it was quite quiet, as well as effective.

9. There was no lightswitch by the bed. I had to leave a flashlight by the bed as if we were camping.

10. There was no spray in the bathroom. (As I've said elsewhere, my girlfriend tells me she never found *one* bathroom in Vietnam with a spray. Since the Vietnamese don't use toilet paper, what in heck do they do??) I had brought wetwipes so I was not inconvenienced.

11. There was a sign saying "don't put toilet paper in the toilet". Apparently this is standard in Vietnam, but it's not pleasant. They did provide a trashcan with a foot-operated lid.

12. The toilet paper provided was scratchy and did not tear at the perforations.

13. The fan in the bedroom was apparently broken at the hinge and fixed in place with tape, so it did not rotate, nor could the direction be adjusted.

14. The cable channels were not very good. As well as being grainy there was no major news channel. However, there were four sports channels in English.

15. Several other minihotels offer free Internet, but not here.

16. The sink had a bare bulb and a slightly funky adjustable mirror that obstructed the sink so that I clonked my noggin against it when washing.

17. One morning there was almost no water pressure in the shower (and this was on the *first* floor).

Advantages

1. The room had a fan *and* ac. This allowed us to leave the ac off for long periods, which is really more comfortable (my girlfriend was complaining of dry skin).

2. The location has to be one of the quietest in Saigon, especially in the Pham Ngu Lao area. It's just about halfway down a narrow alley, about eighty meters from either end.

3. I don't know about the other rooms, but the apparent recent redecoration made the room feel much less scrungy than I've encountered at other hotels.

4. The curtains had an effectively opaque backing. This is standard in US hotels, but in Asia the curtains are often transparent.

5. The separate blankets made it more comfortable for me (my girlfriend tends to wind the top sheet firmly around her as soon as she falls asleep, leaving me bare).

6. I absent-mindedly left my usb key in my pants pocket when I sent it for laundering. It was found and returned immediately without me needing to ask.

7. I didn't need it myself, but the hotel does have more space than most for motorcycles.

Incidentally, I just did a Google search for this hotel, and it's striking how many apparently separate sites use the same text. As far as I can see a lot of people are setting up fake info sites that consist of just pages downloaded from other sites, and then they hope that Google will send people to their site to read Google ads. Phooey on them.

Terrible tissues in Vietnam

Ever since I lived in Germany I've looked out for "Tempo" facial tissues – ie the things you carry in your pocket to wipe your nose with. In the USA they're hard to find: Kleenex has the market sewn up. But to me Kleenex tissues are flimsy, and so is the packaging. A Tempo pack survives my pocket, and the tissues survive my nose. Try them.

So when I went to Vietnam I was happy to find "Tanpe" tissues, apparently manufactured by "Giay thom cao cap thanh van". As well as having a similar name, the packaging is quite similar.

When I opened up the pack I found that the paper quality is inferior. Although somewhat stouter than Kleenex, it is not soft: to me it seems similar to paper towels – ie the absorbent paper you use to wipe up spills.

Much worse: they apparently print the blue logo and text on the *inside* of the package. Presumably they do this so it won't rub off in shipping. However, it rubs off *on the inside*. That's right, the tissue you might want to wipe your eyes with has fragments of blue ink over it.

Incidentally, the pack in front of me says "Menthol" but I could never smell menthol on them. They had a faint smell of something, but it was more like fish sauce.

2006 Mar 12 [ Sun ]

The "Vietnamese for Beginners" series

The Lonely Planet guide says that the Fahasa bookshop is run by the government and has a good selection of language books and maps, so it was the first place I went in Saigon. (In the following text, I have omitted Vietnamese diacritics.)

I went to the branch at 185 Dong Khoi. The LP book describes another branch that we went to later, and I noticed a third branch nearby (which was smaller than the other two).

The staff speak English, although a little hesitantly. You need to be aware that there are two cashiers, one for the audio/video dept and one for the rest, ie you have to pay separately. (There may be still others that I did not encounter.)

Among other things, I bought volume 1 of "Tieng Viet Vietnamese for Beginners" by "Phan Van Giuong". I think the price was 50,000 Dong, ie a bit over 3 USD. The price includes two CDs. When I got the book back to the hotel I glanced at it (without trying the CD) and it seemed OK, so later I got volumes 2 and 3 (which were all they had – the course description in the book is not very clear, but apparently there are actually 6 books in the course, intended to last a total of 3 years).

The book carries a publication date of 1990, and refers to being produced by the Asian Languages Project to support a course run at the Victoria University of Technology in Australia. The publisher's name is apparently Nha Xuat Ban Tre. The phrase "VIETNAMESE FOR FOREIGNERS" (as shown, including the quotes) is on the cover but not I believe part of the title.

There are many passages which do not appear to have been edited. For instance, on page 1:

"The Vietnamese alphabet is composed of 12 vowels and 17 consonants."

On page 2:

"There are 28 consonants symblos in the Vietnamese alphabet but only 21 consonants phonemes and only eight of them may be in final positions. They are marked with an asterik in the following chart:"

The typos and slipshod English are not very important. What is important was that he had an important point to make but he made it with zero clarity. I *think* he is trying to draw a distinction between a glyph such as the letter "g", which of course can be a consonant by itself, and what I might call a "two-glyph" consonant such as the pair of glyphs "gi", which is not pronounced like "g" then "i". (You may not think my explanation is much better, but I'm not expecting you to pay for it.)

As expected, the discussion of tones was utterly inadequate:

"Vietnamese... is a tone language. That is, each syllable is formed with at least one vowel accompanied by a tone (or musical pitch) which is meaningful and forms part of the syllable." This is terrible by itself. (Wikipedia refers to a doctoral dissertation by Pham, Andrew Hoa: "Vietnamese tone: Tone is not pitch", but this explanation of what tone *is* is rotten even compared to the usual low standard.)

Page 5 brings in the term "tonemes" which I have not seen before but which is OK. It's not really necessary I *think* because you can just use the term "tones", but it's conceivable that, for instance, Hanoi Vietnamese uses a different tone for "low broken" than Saigon Vietnamese, but both tones count as a single phoneme, just as English people sometimes pronounce "t" as "dt" and sometimes as "th" without being conscious of any difference.

As usual, the explanation of the tones seems to conflict with the diagram, eg "low broken".

Incidentally, it seems to me that existing Vietnamese fonts are not suitable for the beginner, because the diacritic marks are extremely hard to distinguish, even in fonts where they are not whimsically distorted. If I were to study the language seriously, I would develop my own font in which each character had plenty of space to allow the diacritics to be large and clear. I would certainly do so if I were selling a book.

Today I had a chance to try one of the CDs, and was immediately sunk in gloom. Although the CD read OK, the first track on the CD appears to be the whole of one side of a tape, making it absurdly difficult to find any particular position. Additionally the audio is very difficult to follow even if you are looking at the book.

But worst of all, the audio quality is abysmal – perhaps telephone quality. I do not believe the CD was made from original recordings; it appears to have been made from tenth generation cassette ripoff copies. Sometimes, it's hard to make out the English, never mind subtleties in the Vietnamese (eg final "nh").

I suppose it's my own fault for buying a ripoff copy, but I really didn't expect a bookstore operated by the Vietnamese state to baldly rip off a textbook. What a naif I am.

My trip to Vietnam this month

I've just returned from a few days in Vietnam. I have quite a lot of notes but I may be too lazy to write it all up. But here's some basic stuff:

1. Vietnam, at least the parts I saw, seems a lot cleaner and more well-organized than Cambodia or Thailand.

2. Saigon seems distinctly cooler than Phnom Penh. Perhaps the may trees and parks help, or perhaps the brisk wind throughout our stay helped.

3. My girlfriend reports that *none* of the toilets in Vietnam that she tried had a spray attachment.

4. We were repeatedly ripped off, although nothing was stolen. The scam was the same as at Kien Svay a few weeks ago, or even simpler: for instance, I agreed a price with a cyclo man, and when he got there he demanded the *original* price he asked, and started shouting. I started shouting "Police! Police!" and he backed down.

5. People seemed to speak less English than in Cambodia or Vietnam. In particular, many signs were in VIetnamese only, even the sign for the toilet in a touristy area.

6. Many sources talk about the undending streams of motos, and how to cross the road. I found the advice to cross slowly to be quite accurate and had no real problems. Vietnamese drivers seem more skilled and cautious than in Cambodia or Thailand.

All in all, I found the repeated attempts to extort and scam money wearisome. I do not intend to go back, and would not advise others to do so.

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