Our New House in Saigon

After spending my first week back looking for houses, Steven and I went to the AIS Teacher welcome dinner on Friday evening at the famous Caravelle hotel central Saigon. One of the teachers sitting at our table heard of our housing search and gave us the number of The, pronounced "T," the man she had been working with and highly recommended him.

That Saturday, after driving through flooded streets in the pouring rain to see two unfurnished houses in Binh Thanh District with the people from Nice House, I sent a text to The, who immediately text me back informing me that he had two houses for $600 in District One. Steven and I headed straight to the address he provided and immediately fell in love with the first house, only going to see the second because the first was so nice we thought it would be nice to have two great options. We left The telling him we'd let him know as soon as we could about the properties and sent him a text two minutes later on our way home telling him that we wanted to rent the first house and asked him to call the owner to ask him to hold it for us. We went to sign the contract the following day and set a move in date of Friday, August 28.

Today, August 28, we said goodbye to the lovely ladies of the Tuanh Duc hotel and hauled our stuff from Pham Ngu Lao to our new house at 18A Nguyen Thi Minh Khai.

Steven had left school during his planning period to help me move all of our stuff, so once he left I got busy unpacking and settling in. After a few hours and numerous trips up and down our steep staircase, I had emptied our suitcases into three wardrobes in our three separate bedrooms - one for me, one for Steven and one for work clothes in the downstairs bedroom, three kitchen drawers and two knickknack drawers. I defrosted the fridge, wiped down the cabinets and stacked up all my books, to a soundtrack of my favorites from our MP3 player hooked up to speakers in the front living room.

After I set everything up, I took pictures of the house to post, but my mother said that my description made more sense than the pictures, so I'll include both.

The house is two stories, three bedroom/two bath. From the front door, you walk into the living room and go through a little hall to the kitchen. The first bathroom (which is identical to the second upstairs with a sink, toilet and hot water shower contraption on the wall) sits off that hall just before the kitchen. The downstairs bedroom is at the end of that hall. Each of the three bedrooms are identically furnished with big beds, full sized wardrobes, and televisions on television stands. Walking up the three turns of the narrow stairs leads you to the second floor. There is one bedroom to the right of the stairs with a door that leads to the front patio.The patio is about 8 x 8 and looks out over the alley. To the left of the stairs is the second bathroom, identical to the first. At the other end of the hall is our bedroom, identical to the other two - all with individual a/c units. There is a door off of our bedroom leading to a small, fenced in back patio where we can hang our clothes to dry and have interesting views of our neighbors tin roofs.

In between our bedroom and our bathroom is an open space of about three feet by eight feet that spans the height of  the house. There is a sturdy metal grate in the middle to let light in from an adjustable sky light on the roof. The sky light is operated by a pulley system from the second floor, so you  can pull one rope to open the sky light when it is nice out and it looks like there is no ceiling at all. When it rains, or you leave, or at night, you just pull it closed and it looks like part of the ceiling.

From the front room, we have another patio area, where we park our motor bike. That front area is separated from the house by tinted glass doors (and curtains that you can pull across). The doors can be unhinged from the floor to open the entire width of the house (or about 8 feet). A metal gate, that also spans the width of the house separates the front area from the alley. The ceilings on the first floor are about 12 feet high.

Most families leave their front rooms open for the cool air, so anyone who walks by can see  right into your house and you can hear everything going on in the alleys and the other houses. It may sound strange, but it is a neat way of being a part of what is going on in the neighborhood without quite being a part of what is going  on in the neighborhood. You can see into everyone's house when you walk down  the alley. When we want privacy, we can shut the door and  pull the curtains.

Not only do we love the house, but the location is great too. We have lots of little vegetable stands, local stores and street restaurants. We less than a five minute drive to Notre Dam Cathedral and central Saigon, a  five minute drive to Steven's school, and the best part of it all is that half a block north of us is a soccer stadium with a track that we can use for free whenever we want - the only hindrance being the addition of someone's house that was built out over all six lanes about three fourths of the way around so if you stayed in your lane you would run smack into the side of their house.


Here are the pictures of our new house:

Moving up in the Blogosphere

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Fifteen Feet and a World Apart

As I sit in our hotel room on the last day before we move into our new house, I can't help, but be struck by the contrast between my room on the third floor of our hotel and the third floor of the house across the alley, both with unencumbered views of the other when the curtains aren't drawn.

Our room is a large-ish hotel room, with two double beds pushed together into more of a king, a dorm-sized refrigerator, topped by a 13" television, further topped by our JVC DVD player, my present to Steven on his last birthday. Solid concrete walls and weather stripped windows keep the cool air from the single unit air conditioner from mixing with the heavy heat of the outside air. Cool off-white tiles extend from the bathroom to the right of the door to the 4 x 3 balcony, a railing of adjacent iron rectangles between us and the open space of the alley.

Across the alley, a room equal in size to that of our hotel room is partially shielded from view by a plywood wall that stops a foot from the corrugated tin roof. The balcony stretches a further three feet from the wall, closed in by a railing constructed of 15 boards of varying width and stain, topped by a longer, but similar board, stained and sanded to a smooth finish. The balcony, spanning the width of the house is cluttered with clothes: clean clothes hanging on hangers on the line, wet clothes draped over the railing, dirty clothes in a pile on the floor. A blue and gray striped tarp hangs from rings on an outer line, pulled taunt in the afternoons when heavy rains threaten to flood the inside. A patch of old linoleum tile covers a large portion of the balcony, the floor of the remainder, continuing inside the room, bare plywood. Barely visible in the dim light of the inside, the room appears to be filled with the trappings of everyday living, piled haphazardly in the manner of those sharing a small space among many.

Not to paint my neighbors as paupers, I will add that the second floor underneath the third is tastefully closed off from the outside by a facade of tinted glass, engraved with bamboo and ornamental flowering trees; a sectioned wooden dining table is visible through the open window resting on a darkly stained wood floor.

But the fact still remains that the contrast between the world that I come from, a world that as much as I hate to admit it, follows me wherever I go in the style of my accommodations, my choice of entertainment, my options of communication, the 250+ lbs of possessions lying on the floor of my room is a world apart from the one that lies just 15 feet away.

Our Alley off of Pham Ngu Lao

Our Hotel

Our Hotel Lobby

Our $13 a Night Room


The View from our Balcony

The View from our Balcony

Our Hotel Alley

Our Hotel Alley

The Alley to our Hotel Alley

The Alley to the Alley our Hotel Alley

Cyclo Parked Outside of Our Hotel

Clay Pot Restaurant next to our Hotel

Delicious Sizzling Fish in a Clay Pot

Seafood Stand in the Alley

The Chickens in the Cage at the other end of the Alley

Apartment Hunting

After being blindly led from apartment to apartment in a frantic search to find housing before it was snatched up by all of the other international teachers this time last year, Steven and I started our apartment hunting early this time around. So early that I had already contacted a few of the online real estate brokers from Atlanta and had an appointment to see an apartment in District 3 on our first day back, Sunday at 11:00 a.m.

Our contact had suggested that we take a taxi to the address of the apartment, but being relatively familiar with the city and having spent the past 38 hours either on a plane, in an airport or sleeping in our hotel, we decided to walk.

I had chosen to see the first apartment specifically because of its location. Steven would be working at the new AIS middle school in Binh Thanh District, which is just north of HCMC’s central District 1. The apartment was in District 3, the district just west of District 1, close enough – I thought – for a convenient, traffic free trip to work. We started from District 1 and made our way down the street into District 3 looking for the address we had been given. As we walked we realized, by looking at the street numbers, that this apartment as quite a bit further from District 1 than we’d realized. About 20 minutes later, with the bridge from District 3 to the next district over just in sight, we found the address and spent the next 20 minutes looking at two tiny apartments in a typical seven story Vietnamese style home that we knew we wouldn’t be coming back to.

Our first option rejected, we began our search anew on Monday. We started by telling everyone we met that we were looking for a place to rent – me, the woman at the front desk of our hotel, her daughter, the woman at the Indian restaurant around the corner and all my friends from SCC – Steven, all of his friends at school , the ladies in administration and the IT guy. Then I started looking for places online and throughout the week arranged to meet with an agent from VN Renting on Tuesday, my Vietnamese teacher, Phuoc from last year on Wednesday, Phuong from Transpo properties on Thursday and an agent from Nice House on Friday.

On Tuesday, I was taken to apartments in Binh Thanh, near Steven’s school. The first one was too small and to far north, the second too big and expensive – both in high rise buildings. Wednesday, Phuoc took me to three different places she had found for rent in the paper – the first, I fell in love with at first sight and would have been perfect if I were single, but I thought that Steven may not have loved the old open air apartment as much as I did; the second , a glorified hotel room with a tiny kitchen and oversized bath, and the third a little two story house near the zoo that was practical enough to warrant a visit from Steven after school, but not enough to stall our search. Thursday, Phuong from Transpo Properties, who had found us our apartment last year, took me to another high rise apartment in District 1, which I loved, but it was big and quite far from the school and, again, in a high rise. Later that afternoon a woman from Nice House took me to see an apartment in the area where our hotel is, which I have fallen in love with, despite it being surrounded by the backpacker area, but it was right on the main street. Friday, I went with the same woman from Nice House, who took me to yet another high rise, even though I told them we did not want to see apartments in a high rise. The apartment was perfect – cheap and beautiful, but in a high rise in District 4.

Initially, all of this apartment hunting was fun. I loved getting back out on the road on our motorbike, spending an afternoon with Phuoc, who has become a treasured friend, and riding on the back of various motorbikes through new and familiar parts of the city, but near the end of the week, I began to get a little anxious. The problem is that I am too focused on finding a specific place that may not exist in terms of our ability to find housing. Steven wants a place with a roof terrace or a balcony somewhere near the school and I want the same, but in an old Vietnamese neighborhood with a local market, street vendors and resident chickens. Unfortunately, most of the places they show foreigners are in these big high rises or more modern neighborhoods, one real estate broker telling me, “Most foreigners don’t want Vietnamese neighbors. They say they are too loud and they do strange things.”

My ideal housing spot looks very much like the alley on which our hotel resides. When you walk out of our hotel door, there is a cyclo parked right outside because a cyclo driver lives across the street. In the evenings, he sits at the shop cum bar that materializes in the corner of the alley next to his house and when he rides his cyclo out in the mornings, he gives me a familiar smile. There are ladies making noodles in the house next store. Two doors down there is a family that sells mouth wateringly delicious clay pot dishes out of their house. At the end of the street there are two chickens that roost on a bicycle leaning against the wall and each morning I look for them to see if they’ve made it past the previous evening’s meal. All through the alley, people are sitting out in front of their houses visiting with their neighbors.

That is my ideal Viet Nam living experience. I know it is out there because I have had the joy of living in it for the past five days, but is it practical to keep passing up other viable options, holding on to this dream of living in my ideal Viet Nam? Steven encouraged me keep looking because neither of us have loved anything that we have seen so far, so I will hang on to the dream for another week or so and in the mean time, I will make the most of where we are right now. Fresh clay pot fish, anyone?

Back in Viet Nam

As soon as we arrived back in Viet Nam, Steven and I both agreed that it felt like we had never left. After all of my hesitation over the summer of what this year would bring, I find myself feeling right at home here, as at home as I do in Atlanta or Lake Worth. If nothing else, that is something I am glad I can say.

But with the familiarity, comes the never ending surprises that Viet Nam always offers up to remind you that there is still more than enough foreign in the familiar to keep every day an adventure in wonder.

Viet Nam - Take II

When I left Viet Nam in June, I made sure to have dinner one last time at all my favorite places, I had two tailors making 10 different outfits because I'd never be able to have clothes made so cheaply, I walked through the streets soaking up sights, sounds and smells that I wanted to sear forever in my memories of Siagon, I said goodbye to all my friends and I left Viet Nam for the second, and what I thought would be the last, time. It had been a great year, a challenging year, but one filled with new friends, enjoyable trips, delicious food, new experiences and countless happy memories. I was sad to leave, but I was also ready to move on to somewhere we could settle down - for at least two years - where I could find meaningful work and a hoard of new, unexplored weekend travel destinations. But one phone call from Viet Nam in mid-June put all my plans on hold and rendered all my last minute pre-departure errands moot. Steven had been offered a position teaching Geography at the new American International School Middle School in HCMC. We were going back to Viet Nam.

After a summer spent wiling away leisurely hours with family, reconnecting with friends over lunch, dinner and drinks and some long days of working to help Steve and Steven get the house ready to put on the market, I found myself again packing up all of our worldly possessions, those not already tucked away in my brother’s attic or left in our respective childhood homes, into four suitcases and two carry on bags. I was not dreading the trip, but I also was not filled with the excitement of a new journey as I had been the year before. Facing another year in Viet Nam, I had perfected the art of living in the moment over the summer, enjoying spending time with friends and family I would not be seeing for a while, taking time to appreciate the variety of familiar goods on the stores of my local supermarkets, relishing the freedom of driving on the open road, singing along to songs whose lyrics I still remember after all these years. Steven and I spent the last week getting in last minute visits with cherished friends and putting the final touches on the house we hoped would sell soon after we left. At 6:30 a.m. on Friday, August 14th, with only three hours of sleep between us, we loaded up the cab and climbed in for our last ride through Atlanta traffic until our return in the summer of 2010.

Our first flight took us from Atlanta to Dallas/Fort Worth, where we shared our last American meal of creamy spinach and artichoke dip from T.G.I. Friday’s. As we walked toward our gate to board our 13 hour flight to Tokyo, I noticed a familiar figure slouched in a chair near the gate. As we approached the man in the chair, recognition hit me and our return to Viet Nam began early as we happily reunited with a friend from the previous year. After catching up on the past three months, we all boarded the plane. Sixteen hours later on our flight from Tokyo to Ho Chi Minh City our reunion continued as another good friend walked by our seats and gave us a surprised, “Hey!” and a welcoming hug, before joining us for a stretch and a chat to catch up in the back of the plane. I was beginning to look forward to being back.

Our flight landed in HCMC at 10:05 p.m. and the four of us picked up our VISAs, loaded our luggage on carts and shared a taxi to the center of the city where we departed at our respective destinations. Steven and I had booked a hotel in Pham Ngu Lao, the city’s backpacker district, where a plethora of budget hotels compete for travelers and countless restaurants offer cheap cuisine from all parts of the globe. Our room was in a hotel was off the main strip, down a narrow winding alley and up two flights of stairs. After taking a much needed shower, we crashed - our first night back in Viet Nam.

We woke up early the following morning and made our way downstairs and out through the winding alley to one of the numerous restaurants offering breakfast. Over a breakfast of vegetable noodle soup (me), a bowl of muesli with fruit and yogurt (Steven) and one of the ubiquitous backpacker banana pancakes (shared between us), we talked about our plan for the day and watched the morning unfold on the street in front of our restaurant, remarking on the familiarity of it all. As I watched the fruit vendors walking down the street, the shoe shine boys crowding around Steven’s shoes as they shined them on the sidewalk, old Vietnamese men chatting with each other over their bowls of pho, I recognized with surprise and delight, that I was genuinely glad to be back in Viet Nam.