Saturday, we were up early - Steven off to an AIS basketball game and me to the computer to finish putting together my activities plan for my next (last, hurrah!) five weeks of teaching at the school. When Steven got home, we spent a few hours cleaning the apartment to be ready for our Sunday visitors - me sweeping and mopping (i.e. walking around with a wet towel on each foot) the inside of the apartment, while Steven scrubbed the grime from the floors of the balconies and scrubbed the bathroom to a sparkling white. When we were finished, we headed out for lunch at a new vegetarian place down the street and then for a 60 minute massage from a blind masseuse.
After a tasty lunch and a nice, if at times painful, massage, we were back home and getting ready for our night on the town.
Steven and I have somewhat of a routine when we leave the house, which involves me asking him if he has money? (yes), keys? (yes), hat? (yes), etc. depending on where we happen to be going. I do this mostly because I've become lazily dependent in my marital state in Viet Nam and now whenever I go anywhere with Steven, I leave my wallet, keys, money, etc., at home and let him carry everything. Usually he doesn't mind, but this time he told me, politely, five minutes after we'd realized we'd locked ourselves out of our apartment, that he really wished that I would carry my keys. In my excitement about Water Puppets and Korean food, I had locked both the door and the deadbolt without asking my usual litany of questions, leaving us without a personal means of transportation or a home to come back to that evening.
Luckily our neighbors were leaving the apartment building just as we were, so we were able to follow them out the front door to the street. Steven called our landlord, Mr. Viet, who assured us that he would be at our house after 5 tomorrow with his mother as planned. Not wanting to push him to leave his mother, who had just arrived, to drive the 1.5 hour round trip to our apartment because of our absent-mindedness, we decided to suck it up and continue with our plans for the evening. Luckily, I have become pretty familiar with the city's bus system and soon we were on the number 6, a new double-decker, to the Golden Dragon Water Puppet Theater.
Water puppets are a long standing tradition and form of cultural tradition in Viet Nam. They have been performed for ages to tell stories and to pay respect to to life of Vietnamese life in the countryside. In the Golden Dragon theater, the largest in Ho Chi Minh City, the stage is a backdrop of an ornate temple framed by trees with a large pool of water in front. The puppets appear in front of the temple in the water, manipulated by puppeteers behind the stage and at times, under the water. On each side of the stage, sit musicians and singers who narrate each performance and provide the accompanying music - all in Vietnamese with traditional Vietnamese music.
From the first act, I was enthralled, like a child at her first feature movie. The puppets ranged from wooden people giving short, incomprehensible (to me) speeches, to animals - fish, frogs, dragons, tigers, ducks, lions - swimming through the water to a lively beat. There were 15 acts over a 50 minute period and each one told a story of life in the country side. Even without knowing the language, it was easy to appreciate the music and the puppetry.
After the performance, I took Steven to a Korean restaurant that I had visited weeks before with one of my Korean students. Despite having only been my second actual Korean meal, I had proclaimed it my new favorite Korean restaurant and had been excited about going back. I ordered a vegetarian bibimbap and Steven ordered a tofu stew and we spent the next hour or so enjoying a wide array of Kimchi (my favorite being the fermented radishes with hot chilies - who knew radishes could be so good?) and our incredibly tasty meals. We practically rolled out of the restaurant with an hour to kill before meeting our friends for drinks at 10:00 p.m.
We decided to go over to the Q Bar, a popular bar underneath the Opera House in the middle of District One. We toured around the inside before choosing a table on the sidewalk underneath the palm trees, where we enjoyed a beer and six dollar lime martini.
At 10:00 we headed over to Vasco's, another Saigon nightspot popular with local exapts, where we were to meet our friends. We had visited Vasco's for the first time the weekend before and had quickly come to the conclusion that it was like being in a foreign country, or more accurately, like being back in the US. Teaching Vietnamese children, working with Vietnamese people and living in an all Vietnamese neighborhood, Steven and I don't usually find ourselves in environments devoid of Vietnamese people. It was quite strange, but since we had no where else to go, we stayed and had a drink with our friends until they decided it was time to go home.
Having no way to get into our apartment, we spent the night in the room of a friend who had generously given up her bed so that we could sleep in an air-conditioned room and woke up Sunday morning, happy to have friends and even happier to have friends with air-conditioned bedrooms. We had planned to go to the gym that morning, but having no work-out clothes, we had to scrap that plan. We thought about going to the pool, but we had no bathing suits. We considered going to a movie, but there wasn't anything playing that we wanted to see. We talked about our original food street plan, but decided that anything that involved being outside in the heat was not a good plan. So we decided to stay where we were on the couch and watch movies. We watched. Our friends napped. Some went for food. We napped. Finally, restless and hot (only the bedrooms in most Vietnamese houses are air-conditioned, if any room at all), we decided to go to a movie at Bobby Brewers so that we would at least be able to sit in an air-conditioned room for a few hours.
We dragged ourselves off the couch, still wearing yesterdays clothes, and walked in the sweltering heat to Bobby Brewers only to find that the theater was full. Since the rest of the restaurant was unair-conditioned, we walked back outside, sweat dripping out of every pore and again contemplated our options. We decided to call Mr. Viet again to see if he could come any earlier. The idea of waiting until 6:00 p.m., to great our guests outside of our apartment, covered in the sweat and grime of the city, hot, tired, hungry and grumpy from the heat did not appeal to me. Steven got through, but was unable to communicate our situation and was left with Mr. Viet again confirming his 6:00 visit. We realized then that he probably didn't understand that we didn't have keys. So I tried again with a text message this time. In Vietnamese. Nothing. Wanting nothing but a shower and an air-conditioned room, we walked down the street wracking our brains for restaurants we knew of with air-conditioning. The shower would have to wait.
We walked under the beating sun to a falafel place that we'd remaindered fondly only to find it closed, due to a "dispute with the house owner." Luckily, the Vietnamese restaurant next door was also air-conditioned and we whiled away another hour over cold tea and mussels.
After lunch, we got a bus back to our friend's house where we resumed our positions under the fan and queued up the afternoons line-up of entertainment.
Finally 5:30 came with the setting of the sun, marking the end of a wasted day, and we caught a bus to our apartment, were we again parked ourselves in the heat and waited.
From 6:00 - 7:00 p.m. exhausted and practically delirious from the heat, we watched as hundreds of motorbikes and dozens of taxi's drove by without Mr. Viet and his mother. "There he is!" one of us would shout, with the other answering, "but isn't Mr. Viet 20 years older without a mustache?" "There he is!" "Uh, no. That's a woman..." "There he is!" "Um. No."
Finally, after drawing an amused crowd to whom I was able to explain, "Khong co chia hoa (We have no key)" Mr. Viet and his mother appeared. When he realized that we didn't have keys, he was very apologetic and kept shaking his head in disbelief. Luckily for us, we had cleaned the apartment on Sunday and Mr. Viet's mother's English was worse than his, so we only had to spend about 10 minutes exchanging pleasantries before they excused themselves and we finally had the apartment back to ourselves.
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