Vietnam/Cambodia 2005: Travels of a former business journalist

Back in the USA

Back in the USA, after five years (excluding brief vacations to visit family)

The day after my flight touched down, I drove an hour outside Manhattan to visit my brother's family.  His three kids are all nine, and in the throes of learning about the 50 states.  On the way to and from baseball practice, they recited the states, I tested them on the capitals, and lost ten bucks to my nephew Ben who rightly insisted the capital of New Mexico was Santa Fe while I bet it was Albequerque.  So much for all my world travel and knowledge of Asia! All it gets me is ten bucks poorer.  My niece also impressed me by reciting the names of national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone and telling me which states they are in,  and reminding me that I could spend the enxt half of my life travelling just inside the borders of the US.

It's WAY too early to see what's changed since I last left, but I'll notice more in the coming weeks after I open a new bank account (and see what's happened to the banking industry),  get a mobile phone (I've never had one in the US, when I lived here last the connections weren't good and the pricing plans too complicated), start watching TV (so I can understand what people are talking about); read more blogs (which weren't a real force in US media/social life when I left, and I'll have more time since I am not gainfully employed yet -- so I will also see what the job situation is like!).

Final days

(photo: Hanoi street scene)

May 17, 2005

A week away from leaving Vietnam, after nearly three months in the country. I left the quietness of Hanoi to spend my last days in Saigon. It is a good reminder of how different north and south are. One Sunday I checked out of the sprawling, austere Army Guesthouse in Hanoi, where I was woken up at 6:30 every morning for the last month to the sound of a military bugle call. Yesterday, I checked into the Liberty Hotel in Saigon, and fell asleep to the thumping room-shaking vibration of the hotel’s first floor disco.

It’s late May, and both cities feel like saunas. Saigon is more oppressive because it doesn’t have Hanoi’s lakes. And Hanoi hasn't yet developed the urban stress of Saigon. I’d often heard people call Hanoi a village -- both derisively and affectionately -- but didn’t quite know what they meant. But on my last night in Hanoi, I was out on the street as the sky turned dark, and suddenly, on the pavement, crowds of super-low stools and tables appeared and people filled the pavement for streetside dinner -- noodles, fried tofu, beer, cigarettes. Completely ignoring the urban life around them, they took over the sidewalk as if there were an alley in a village. Peasant vendors -- elderly woman wearing black trousers, that iconic wide cone hat, teeth blackened from chewing betel nut – padded down the pavement, their shoulders weighed down by heavy balances piled with pineapples or vegetables or some other goods (they look like they’d just come in from the real countryside.) Hanoi is fun in the way that so much life takes place out on the streets, and people seems obilvious to the fact that activities that in others take place behind closed doors are in plain view of passersby. On Hanoi's main streets I’ve seen: streetside barbers clipping away, a circular mound of black hair piling up at the bottom of the single chair; women relaxing across the entranceway of the open shop as another woman gives her a pedicure; families eating dinner, moms spooning food into their standing kids' mouths.

Saigon has more of a shyster feel to it. It’s faster and busier, there’s more a of that big city whooshing traffic sound.

Shop displays look more Hong Kong, slicker and more modern with pop music blasting out (into my unhappy ears). LOTS more Taiwanese and Korean businessman. It’s a more pragmatic place, business wise. People are more direct. It’s here that I found the most savvy and innovative publisher I’ve met so far in Vietnam. She told me other journalists scoff at her publication, and criticize the content as unintellectual, simplistically written. They laugh at the short sentences and the short articles that fill her colorful Cosmo-type women’s magazine. SHE says she doesn’t want high-falutin, convoluted and wordy prose of traditional Vietnamese journalism. She says she wants a magazine that's easy for consumers to digest.

Aside from the North South divide -- the FOOD says alot about the changes in Vietnam, in hanoi AND Ho Chi Minh City.

That Starbucks-style coffee chain (branches in both cities) I wrote about in an earlier post seems to be getting more and more crowded every day. I went to Highlands Coffee (it even has a circular logo) with friends the other day and we had to drive around and around looking for a branch that had a seat. It’s not only foreigners now, but mostly Vuppies (Vietnamese yuppies) sipping lattes, eating sandwiches, looking very up-and-coming. (CAVEAT: even though I complained about the processed cheese, Highlands has a much bigger menu of Western and Vietnamese cuisine and inarguably has much better food than Starbucks.)

Today I ate lunch in one of Vietnam‘s first fast food chains. PHO24 is a modern take on the country’s most famous food, the rice noodle soup called pho, normally found in grungy one-off shops (still tasty) or dished out by streetside vendors and eaten squatting on the streetside. A few years ago, a savvy businessman (an overseas Vietnamese, I’m told), figured if he offered a reasonably tasty bowl of pho, in a clean environment (paper placemats), with modern service, he could charge more. He was right. The basic pho at PHÕ is a pricier 24,000 VND, which is about $1.75. His shops are regularly packed -- with rich foreigners afraid to eat on the street, tourists, Vuppies, and the increasingly number of ordinary Vietnamese who have extra cash and want to go upscale. Had a hard time finding a seat there today as well. It started in Ho Chi Minh City, recently opened up in a branch in Hanoi.

I will miss not just PHO, but all the other varieties of rice noodle, each with a different name depending on the kind of meat or the broth; the cha ca la vong (fish served to you in a pan of hot bubbling oil spiced with turmeric (??) I think and other seasoning, with plates of fresh dill parsley and other fresh herbs which you pile into the hot pan and stir around); banana flower salad; even the Western food is done wonderfully -- thin crust pizza; fresh baguettes. I'll stop here I'm getting hungry.

Interesting business news

Vietnam's National Assembly is in session, and the papers are doing some interesting coverage of the issues under debate.  Here is an interesting article from the English edition of Thanh Nien news (May 8) , on the discussion of how to define "businessmen" in Vietnam

Lawmakers split over definition of businessman

Street vendors in Vietnam should also be recognized by the country’s Trade Law as businessmen, some legislators said May 7 while reviewing the revised law at the national parliament’s month-long seventh session.

The National Assembly discussed a revised draft of the Trade Law which stated street vendors, who did not have to get business licenses, were not businessmen. A legislator said the current draft regulation was adequate as businessmen had to be professional business organizations and individuals. Street vendors do not do business regularly as they have lack of understanding and knowledge over business contracts, he said. Important business network But, another legislator disagreed.  He said street vendors had set up a very “important business network”. If the Trade Law does not regulate these vendors then which legal document would apply to them, he questioned. Another legislator said the law did not establish control over street vendors in order to facilitate their operations by not collecting taxes from them.  Otherwise, if we collected taxes, this would drive street vendors out of society. But, there are tens of thousands of street vendors, said another legislator. Even though they don’t have business licenses, they still pay taxes, he said. Many of them do not do large-scale business, but they are still a type of businessman, he added. Reported by Manh Quan & Tuyet Nhung – Translated by Hieu Trung

Ah the trouble with MAIDS in Vietnam

Maid trouble in Vietnam

The day before Vietnam celebrated the 30^th anniversary of Liberation Day, or Unification Day (when the North Vietnamese Army took control of South Vietnam and sent the U.S. military fleeing), I sat in a pizza restaurant in Hanoi with two late 20-something Vietnamese women, discussing the trouble with maids. 

Both girls live with their families, and their parents employ household help. Neither is married – they both enjoy their jobs and want to wait a bit before tying the knot. It isn’t because they fear they can't balance work and family, like women in the U.S. and Japan, where there isn’t easily affordable childcare. Here in Vietnam, most women can go back to work right after having a baby because it is easy to get a poor girl from the countryside to work as a maid. It costs twenty or thirty dollars a month.

If the idea of household help seems anathema to an egalitarian Communist society, one of my lunch companions explained that hiring maids was common during French colonial rule, but the practice disappeared from 1975 to 1995, “when everyone was poor.”  Many Vietnamese are richer now, society is no longer egalitarian, it's increasingly un-Communist, and household help is back in fashion.

And so is complaining about maids. When I brought up the topic to other Vietnamese friends, they all nodded their heads in agreement. And Vietnamese-language newspapers (so I am told because I can't read them) are full of stories about maid scandals, maids who can’t cook, who can’t clean, who don’t understand basic hygiene, who don’t know how to use city appliances like dishwashers, and who steal everything from money to employers’ husbands.  One of my lunch mates’ work colleagues, a business reporter, calls her nanny from work to tell her not to steal her child’s food. 

At first, these complaints seemed to me like middle class whining.  But when you think about it, bringing naïve, untrained and uneducated and poorly paid girls into city homes is a recipe for trouble.  Putting a young girl who has grown up living with only her father and brothers in close quarters with a strange man…that seems another situation that could easily end up in tears.  One of my lunch companions told me about one friend’s maid who innocently confessed to her employer, “every time your husband comes home I can’t help but start blushing.”

Socialist Vietnam teaches its citizens that they are “masters of society," explained another Vietnamese reporter-friend. So when Masters find themselves in subservient positions like maid or cook, that can't be easy on the ego.... especially the North Vietnamese, who are, many say, more “proud” than the practical, business-minded Southerners.

Egos aside, the broader issue is that women’s continued participation in the workforce here depends on poor women working in their homes. 

Vietnam is way ahead of other Asian countries in this respect, especially Japan and Korea – which are richer, but didn‘t have socialist policies specifically aimed at gender equality to counteract age-old Confucian beliefs about women’s position being subservient to husbands and sons. 

Women in Vietnam – according to statistics I compared from various UN and other websites --  make up 47% of the workforce and 26% of the National Assembly representatives  ((in China 21.8%. of lower house members are women.  Forget Japan – according to a 2003 stat, women hold 35 out of the lower house’s 480 seats ….that’s a little more than 7 percent) I have pasted more comparative stats below.

Either grandparents become babysitters, or parents hire maids.   

You’d think there'd be a huge market for maid training firms.  I asked my two pizza lunch mates if there are companies or state run agencies that regulate the industry. They both shook their heads and said the only professional household-help-training agency is aimed at foreigners.

It's one agency -- run by a New Zealand expat in Hanoi who retired from the explosives industry and now runs Maid in Vietnam Co. Ltd., "the first licensed organization to train housemaids for foreign families in Vietnam." (www.maidinvietnam.com)

Mike Langrish-Smith says he started the company after his wife told him to stop whining about the lack of properly trained help in Vietnam.  Especially compared to other countries that have a plentiful supply of reliable and satisfactory domestic help. Women from the Philippines are the world’s top producer of domestic help, and are respected for their hard work, reliability, honesty, English language ability. The Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Indonesia are the four main suppliers of households help, says Langrish-Smith.

Vietnam is catching up   -  the government is boosting its labor exports and Langrish-Smith says there are some Vietnamese firms who sign up Vietnamese girls, and export them –  at times inadvertently into prostitution.   But Langrish-Smith only trains his staff to work for foreigners living in Vietnam, for various reasons.

First, there is no market of local Vietnamese families needing trained help, even the growing upper and middle classes.   “Most Vietnamese don’t really care so much about quality. The most important thing is price,” Langrish-Smith says, “they really don’t care if they have to keep changing maids every week. They’re probably even happy not to have to pay for that week [the week the maid leaves]”

Langrish-Smith focuses on training maids to cook, clean, and raise kids for the specialized and higher-paying market of Western families living here.   

Here is how he advertises:

“We give the maids training in personal hygiene and health care - (i.e. what are bacteria and why foreigners get sick and they do not)! This is especially important for children, with food preparation and general cleanliness in the house/apartment. They also get basic first aid training and a thorough medical check-up, as the majority have parasites (worms) and many have been found to have Hepatitis and TB. Thereafter they study Child Care, Kitchen Management, Household Safety and Cookery. We then categorise them as "General Housekeepers", "Cooks" and "Nannies."

Langrish-Smith deals with an entirely different class of Vietnamese women – I don’t mean social class, but a group of more motivated individuals.  He says he rejects 80% of the women who come to his agency to apply for a job (that’s 2-3 women a day). He only accepts women who have some education and have already taken it upon themselves to study a foreign language.  Even some of those women realize, soon after training starts, that they don’t want to spend their days sticking their hands down toilets.

Still, foreigners’ maids are, in Vietnamese eyes, different from maids in Vietnamese families. My pizza lunch mates said maids are normally looked down on but those who work for foreigners are seen as having a status job.

Langrish-Smith says he currently has about 100 women on staff – one is even a middle aged but bored wife of a diplomat who works as a Maid In Vietnam cook.

Others are teachers or lawyers who can't find jobs in their own profession and still have to feed their families. Langrish-Smith says they can earn more working for his firm, where hourly rates range from $1 to $2.50 an hour, than they can working for a State-run company. They also get bonuses and health insurance.  Maid In Vietnam does the invoicing, and takes out a portion for training costs and taxes.

Langrish-Smith also said he only hires women from Hanoi, because of legal problems.  If there's trouble with a girl from outside Hanoi, Hanoi police won't deal with it because she isn't a registered Hanoi resident, and the provincial police said they won't deal with it because the crime was committed in Hanoi. 

He says the big problems arise when a Maid in Vietnam maid works for a foreigner who is married to a Vietnamese.   Especially if the wife is South Vietnamese  -- and/or from a lower social class.  A more educated or higher-class Northern woman won’t be happy taking orders from someone she sees as lower in class (then her).  Regional and class tensions can explode over household chores or child-rearing practices.

In some cases the Vietnamese wife of the employer sees the maid as a "potential distraction," says Langrish-Smith, "which opens yet another can of worms!"  Often, a Vietnamese wife might want something done in a Vietnamese way that isn’t taught at Maid In Vietnam training.

Langrish-Smith’s life would be a lot easier if he were operating in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) where, he says, people are “less arrogant” and also 20 years ahead when it comes to understanding service mentality.  But, like many other foreigners in Vietnam, Langrish-Smith prefers the quieter northern capital over the more in-your-face southern metropolis of Saigon.    But he says he does have a license to operate in Ho Chi Minh City and plans to eventually expand the business down south, but for now the existing expat network limits the market for his business. 

_____________

Here are some stats I found on the website of the The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES). "a German non-profit, private educational foundation committed to the concepts and basic values of social democracy."

Japan:  Women form 39.5 per cent of the nation's total workforce. Only 50 per cent of Japanese women are engaged in economy, compared to 77.8 per cent of men. More than one-third of all women workers are part-time employees. Women constitute 67 per cent of the 11 million part-time workers in the country. However, women’s wages are only 62.5 per cent of men's.

China:  The percentage of women's representation in China’s Lower House amounts to 21.8, the second highest among the ASEAN states. Among China's 20 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions, there are 18 female governors or vice governors. Women have become part and parcel of economic life in China. However, there are still wide gaps between the female and male labor force. For instance, 49.2 per cent of women participate in the labor force compared to 76.6 per cent for men.

Vietnam: Vietnamese working women constitute about 47 per cent of the workforce in the state sector and 52 per cent in the private sector. Vietnam has become the leading ASEAN country concerning the percentage of  women’s participation in the Lower House (26 per cent). Furthermore, Vietnam has a female Vice President in Nguyen Thi Binh….Still,  women perform about 60 per cent of the agricultural workload while earning only 72 per cent of the average male wage.

Lao Cybermonks

An internet cafe in Luang Prabang (April 15, 2005).

Lao New Year in Luang Prabang

Lao New Year in Luang Prabang

April 12 to 16, 2005

Next time I come to the beautiful, UNESCO-protected historic city of Luang Prabang during Lao New Year, remind me to bring four more changes of clothing (including underwear), a raincoat, a waterproof camera and a large watergun.

The Lao New Year tradition, I was told by my guesthouse owner, ONCE meant gently pouring water over one another’s hands, for good luck. 

Now, it means drenching everyone who goes by. Luang Prabang, the former royal capital of Laos, is THE place to be for Lao New Year.   (about $300 RT from Hanoi, the route is Hanoi-Vientiane (1.5 hrs) and then Vientiane-Luang Prabang (40 minutes)

During these two or three days, local residents (and perhaps visitors from Vientiane, the capital) line the streets, stationed around vats of water, armed with pails of water and waterguns, and hydro-assault anyone who goes by. 

These Laos are clearly not the happy hilltribe Laos you see in the postcards. 

The first day,  Ric and Rebecca (my travel companions) and I install ourselves at a café next to one of the main roads to watch the action. Any car or motorbike that drives by is fair game. 

Pedestrians are also fair game and in the beginning I was honored to be part of the festivities: we all got a mild smear of charcoal/paint on the face, a splash of cornflower, and then a drenching of water. 

And check out this video clip of the action on the street:

Download PICT1899.AVI

Before the craziness started, we took a boat ride to the Pak Ou Buddha Caves, a $20, hour long ride up the Mekong in a long wooden boat. Our driver brought along his wife and kids.  Here is his beautiful daughter, sitting next to me on the boat:

The caves were really cool – packed with buddha images of all sizes. Lost of tourists, many of them Lao, came for a New Year’s visit, to pray to the buddhas and sprinkle water on them

BTW here is where we stayed for the four nights:

No more $5 hostels for us.. too old for that. Rooms in the chic Apsara Hotel ($55/$65 a night) have super high-ceilings and dark-wood floors, and trimmings in aqua-colored silk. It’s run by a Brit named Ivan. The hotel and restaurant overlook the Nam Khan River, which meets up with the Mejong and forms a “U.”  Luang Prabang is located inside the “U.” At The Apsara’s restaurant/bar/veranda, it’s easy to start drinking gin and tonics and never leave.

The food is superb. We ate fish fried and covered in a tangy sauce and smothered in fresh dill, parsley, basil and other herbs;  watercress salad with pears; pumpkin and vegetable curry; eggplant salad. The profiteroles were sublime.  I was so busy eating I didn’t take photos.

The second day, it is sunny and really really HOT. We move slowly and drink drink drink – water, coconuts, lime sodas.  We station ourselves at a café along another main road to watch the big New Year’s procession.  The parade features Miss Luang Prabang 2005 riding by on an elephant, little Miss Luang Prabangs; monks going by (getting splashed by onlookers); more rowdy boys, a few cross-dressers.

By the end of the day we started sick of getting drenched…especially after this surprise attack while riding in this vehicle-for-hire (I don’t even know how to describe it. I’ve never seen this before). WE survived, here is the photo of us and the driver (also wet)

When the screaming and water attacks die down, it is balmy and peaceful.

  I’m thinking about making a booking for next year.  Prices will probably be higher – they were already double in some cases than the 2004 guide book I’d brought.  I hope UNESCO continues to fight off the inevitable threat of high rise hotels and busloads of tourists. That would be awful.  Luang Prabang is getting touristy, but it’s still mainly small groups of two or three people - families or backpackers --  their numbers are limited by the number of flights that operate here. Luang Prabang is still orderly, safe, clean, and has lots of good services for travelers (like internet, travel agencies, bikes for $1 a day, a variety of good guesthouses,).  Shopkeepers and restaurant staff are really nice and friendly, not grasping and greedy and out to suck as much hard currency from Westerners, which is the feeling you get in a lot of other place in Asia (namely Angkor Wat,  in Cambodia, and increasingly Vietnam). It's easy to forget Laos is an impoverished country, ruled by a dictatorship.

Hanoi on moto

There's no better way to enjoy Hanoi than from the back of a moto. The minute you walk out of your hotel moto drivers are hooting for your attention. They never give up, even though it's clear you are never ever going to get on the back of the motorcycle with that strange guy.  One local expat writer has written a hilarious essay on the different calls of the moto driver and what they mean.  It's kind of subtle, but I'll find it and post some excerpts from the piece. 

The preferable way to ride is on the back of a friend's motorbike. I was lucky to be moto-chauffered around the city by Linh, a fun, 28 year old Australian-educated Vietnamese woman I've been working with.

                                                     

We cruised around Ba Dinh Square - in front you can see Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum:

And we cruised through some of Hanoi's exquisite tree lined alleys

You can see all sorts of Vietnamese culture from the back of a motorbike -- here's the traditional long hair that looks like it is about to get sucked into the back tire.

Mourning the Pope at St. Joseph's Cathedral, Hanoi

The Pope's death was a pretty big deal here. Vietnamese people told me there are ten million Catholics in Vietnam.  Reuters news service says eight million. That's ten percent of the population. Vietnam's Catholic population the the second largest in Asia.  But the Pope never made it here.  Vietnam is changing fast -- opening up -- but religion is still sensitive. Vietnam's Catholics are under strict control and there is little discussion in the press. I couldn't find any news articles that interviewed any Vietnamese Catholics on their feelings about the Pope. 

I wandered into Hanoi's St Joseph's Cathedral the day after the Pope died (Monday April 4), and found workers putting together a sign for that evening's special mourning service. Outside, they were hoisting up the portrait of young Pope John Paul II. One of the workers told me there would be a ceremony that night, and they were expecting about 4000 people.

 

So I returned later in the evening and found people pouring in, wrapping their heads in the traditional Vietnamese white mourning headcloths.

 

Thousand of people packed the cathedral. They sat on pews. and plastic stools inside and outside the main entrance.

 

I didn't understand a word of what was said during the service -- it was conducted in Vietnamese -- but the singing was beautiful. The congregation often broke out into amazing harmonies.  I uploaded a couple files so you can hear:

Download hanoi_pope_mass_1.mp3

Download hanoi_pope_mass_2.mp3 

The view from outside.

Land of No Starbucks

Every ten steps on the streets of Saigon or Hanoi (the two cities I have been in) there is a streetside open air café where people sit on stools six inches from the ground, smoking and sipping 35 cent cups of thick roast coffee, black or sweetened with large dollops of condensed milk. The other kind of coffee shop here is the dim, smoky indoor place that looks like it was designed by a B-grade Romanian interior designer from the 1970s. (sorry about that, Romanians, just my media-influenced impression).

But the future is here – the young Mod Set, celebrity actors, young Westernized Vietnamese working for foreign banks, etc., sip their cappuccinos in a Starbuck’s style coffee chain called Highlands Coffee (fourteen branches). Then there is Vietnam’s own Starbucks chain, Trung Nguyen Coffee (400 branches across the country since 1996).  It’s not as mod as Highlands, but it’s got the chain store idea, and even has branches in neighboring Cambodia. 

But there is no Starbucks yet. That's the “what’s wrong with the picture” feeling you get when first arrive and start strolling around.  No Starbucks. Hard to imagine! (No MacDonald’s either!)

I’m not trying to give Starbucks publicity. I don’t like Starbucks very much and avoided them when I was living in the U.S. I didn’t love the coffee, the bagels were terrible, and I mostly was put off by the big chainstore style business model that wipes out variety in the landscape, not to mention independent café owners.  But, to be fair, Starbucks provides a decent service and decent coffee, and a comfortable place to sit.

But when Starbucks arrives in Vietnam -- I'll bet they'll hit the jackpot. (OK as a former business reporter, I should probably place a call to Starbuck’s P.R. before making any presumptuous comments….any Starbucks officials, please feel free to respond)

It’s great, as an American, to travel outside the free market world of giant chain store capitalism/homogenization. It’s just more interesting. Travelers search for newness, but then again so do young Vietnamese. Highlands Café is new and exciting and a lot of people - from what I can see -- are paying more for that. Sixty percent of this population was born after the War, and a lot of them are eager to be part of the hip global world. That’s the Starbucks appeal in other Asian countries like Japan and South Korea. AND - there are a lot of rich people in Vietnam’s cities now…I'm not sure exactly how they are getting rich, but anyone who can afford the snazzy multi-thousand dollar motorcycles (expensive because of import taxes), can probably afford a two dollar iced latte.

Vietnam's about to open up big time. Vietnam will probably join the WTO next year, if not sooner. Regulations barring foreign businesses from operating here are about to end (formally at least). There are 80 million people in Vietnam– many of them caffeine addicts already. It’s the world’s second largest coffee producer. Starbucks wouldn’t have to go far to find supplies. They may not even have to do much marketing.

Speaking of marketing -- I was having dinner with a group of Vietnamese journalists in their 30s an we began talking about MacDonalds (no MacDonald’s here either). They know what MacDonald’s is, vaguely. One woman said she doesn’t think MacDonald’s will do well here because Vietnamese like a healthier, low cholesteral, low fat diet. Guess she doesn’t have much experience with marketing. That’s what scares me. Pro-WTO market opening propagandists (U.S. government) say “we want Vietnamese to open up so that we can operate on a level playing field). Well, when U.S. companies arrive, they will have so much money and marketing savvy it WON’T be a level playing field. I told the reporter sitting next to me “You don’t understand the power of marketing.” How could I explain the concepts of image, branding and, marketing power, to someone who barely spoke broken English, and grew up in country where making profit was morally bad, and where the press is still reluctant to use the word “private.”

Emerging from the Bust/Travels of a Snob

The International Hotel, where I have been staying, is a grey, shabby three story hotel. There is a great Cantonese restaurant in the lobby. Outside the entrance is a bizarre, larger-than-life-size statue of a happy Black Sambo sitting on a bench holding a bottle of Heineken. There is one computer in the lobby with internet access (fairly fast), and it costs 5000 dong (about 35 cents) for 30 minutes.

A junior suite here costs $140, according to the rate sheet next to my bed. I am paying $35. That “official” high price is still a hangover from Vietnam’s bubble, ten years ago, a friend told me. That’s when foreign businesses rushed in here with the usual overexcitement about emerging economies, throwing money around and jacking up prices . It all burst after the Asian financial crisis (1997/1998), and when foreign businesses realized they couldn't make big profits here, and left. Now I can get this great cheap room in this wacky hotel.

I had lunch the other day with David Lamb, former L.A. Times bureau chief here and the author of “Vietnam Now,” the best book I have found (in English) on Vietnam (the country, not the war), Lamb pointed out to me that big highrise hotels like the Hyatt and the Sheraton – which were left as half-built construction shells after the bubble burst – have now been completed, and open for business. At the top of three super-high highrises that stick up from the Saigon skyline - one reads “Citigroup” Another reads Prudential (insurance), the other, HSBC (the big British bank).  At a the glitzy new Diamond Department Store, wealthy Vietnamese can buy pricey Adidas sneakers with their new HSBC-issued credit cards.

Many people I’ve spoken (not senior officials) want more foreign business in Vietnam. Anything that is linked to foreign business here is shinier, and more efficient (and more expensive). People here want to get rich. And they want the management training.

I have been going (OK I am addicted) to a fabulous spa inside the Omni hotel in Saigon. The massages are superb, lasing more than an hour, and costing $25 to $32, which is outrageous by local standards but fabulous for American or Japanese tourists. The facility is beautiful (wood and lots of plants, great aromas), with jacuzzi, steamroom.  But the service is bumbling. The young girls and guys who work there are sweet beyond belief, incredibly earnest, and caring. But their English is terrible, and there seems to be constant confusion about procedures. When customers (me, or others I’ve watched) have a question or a problem that requires language outside the phrases the staff have learned (like “what kind of massage would you like?” or “where are you from?”), three or four girls come running over trying to understand (often they don’t).

Just as I am getting frustrated, I check myself.  I suppose thick terry cloth bathrobes and steam rooms are new to most Vietnamese, the girls here are so damn kind and so eager to learn. So….debate in the mind of a neurotic traveller…do I lower my standards, and happily accept so-so management, or do I maintain my standards and expect more from Vietnamese who are providing a service, at a higher price, to Westerners? 

Another day, at Highlands Café. I ordered a vegetable and cheddar cheese sandwich. (Note: cheese is not part of the Vietnamese diet.) The sandwich came, and melted over the vegetable was not cheddar cheese but – no bones about it – it was cheese whizzy processed cheese. I tasted it, and it had that gooey tastelessness of cheap fake processed cheese.  I hate processed cheese.

I debated whether or not to swallow it, and not be a picky snobby consumer. But like I said I can’t stand processed cheese, and if the menu says cheddar cheese, even if it only costs 30,000 dong, or about two dollars, I figured if I don’t complain someone else will.  And when Starbucks arrives, if Highland Café doesn’t get its act together it will be flattened.

I called over the waiter and asked “Is this really Cheddar Cheese?” He said yes. I said No it’s not. He insisted it was. I insisted it’s not. This is fake cheese, I explained, gently and politely. The waiter went away and brought back over a plate with a slice of the cheese, "Isn't this Cheddar?" On the plate was a slice of plastic-wrapped processed cheese, exactly the kind I used to unwrap eat with glee when I was six years old and didn’t’ like real cheese.

Then the waiter brought over the whole package, which said “Cheddar” on the label – not “Cheddar flavored,” or “Cheddar inspired” (although I couldn’t detect a whiff of cheddar in my sandwich). The imported fake cheese label just said “Cheddar.” I picked up the package, turned it over, and showed the waiter the tiny-lettered ingredients, which included water and additives and other things.  Perhapas this was his first lesson in misleading product labelling. He said to me, smiling, “oh you are real professional!” which kind of embarrassed me, because I couldn’t tell if he was hiding his irritation under overflattery, or whether he genuinely appreciated my telling him that his café was not service real cheese. (Was I the first person who ever complained about it? There were plenty of other Westerners in the café).

But in the end, I got a really good sandwich – The waiter brought over another kind of cheese and said it was real Gouda. I tasted it, determined it was real Gouda, and in the end I got a real cheese sandwich.

  This pic is from a hotel (the Omni), post spa...

Couldn't resist taking this: