The Curse of the Crazy Landlord

It’s inevitable. You move to Vietnam and start looking for a place to live. Nothing fancy. Just somewhere to lay your head at night, really. Lucky for you, a friend of a friend is moving out of this great place in Tan Binh District - a little bit further out than you expected, but it's just what you wanted; a nice two-storey house, with a rooftop terrace and three bedrooms – perfect for sharing with some friends, and it’s not too expensive either  - even though you know you’re being charged foreigner prices. Okay, so there's some fake grass and flowers in the landing of the stairwell, a huge copy of a Dutch pastoral scene - multicoloured tulips and peaceful windmills - in the living room and the furniture is that heavy, dark wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl horses and dragons.Nevermind, it's still a steal.

You meet the landlord and he or she is all smiles, agreeing to purchase some new appliances, buy some nice(r), comfier couches and hook up the cable TV with BBC and TLC. Everything seems fine, but then, just when you are settling in to your new place and discovering the best places to eat in the hood, it strikes. The curse. The curse of the crazy landlord. Crazy as in weirdo, watch you sleep at night, extort you of all your money, make you think you're the nuts one, crazy.

All expats who have lived here for at least a couple of years and in various locations around the city know the curse of the crazy landlord and also know that it is unavoidable. It is like a rite of passage. Like the Xhosa circumcision rite, just more painful and enduring. While not all landlords are crazy – my current landlord is wonderful – somewhere along the line there is always THE ONE you will never forget. The mere mention of his name makes you utter inane profanities under your breath and make little stabbing motions with your pen. And I use "him" loosely here - just as often it's a "she". A she-devil. You identify these malevolent landlords and ladies (such ironic terms!) by their malignant actions.  They are the ones that you tell your friends back home about and they refuse to believe the stories. Like when you tell them you saw the tokoloshe under your bed last night.They're all scoffs and sniggles as their cognitive dissonance kicks in. 

My "one" was Mr Hiep*. At first, he was lovely - a middle-aged ex-pilot for the air force. When we moved in, he bought a new water cooler and hooked up the ADSL internet just as we had asked. He even bought me a miniature MIG fighter plane made from recycled bomb metal and offered me a pack of Camel cigarettes: "From Mỹ (America)," he assured me. 

Mr Hiep lived behind our house with his family, which was fine at first, but this was also where the trouble started. It meant he had a key for our backdoor, which, in turn, meant that he would drop by unexpectedly at unforeseen hours of the day. His favourite time to drop by for a “chat” was 6:30 am on a Saturday morning, while I was inevitably still sleeping after a late Friday night out. I’d wake up from the smell of cigarette smoke (even though we didn’t allow smoking in the house, Mr Hiep always chain-smoked his way through all the rooms). I’d rub my eyes and he’d be watching me as I woke up – no knocking on the bedroom door either – just...kind of...watching with his red, beady, droopy eyes, like two pomegranate seeds stuck in a melting Dali clock. Other times he'd pop by around 10-11pm. He had this crazy landlord sixth sense that told him when the worst and most inappropriate time to visit was – and that’s when he would appear! 

Sometimes he’d also bring his children – and I’m sure he did this just to torture me. Before I knew it, there'd be little hyperactive sugar-fueled balls of destruction whizzing through the house screaming and going through all my possessions. Sometimes he would come over with a few beers, which he drank most of himself, or some food that I'm sure he knew I wouldn't really eat, like durian, moon cakes or nem chua, which he ate most of himself, and told us stories about the war. The drunker he got the worse his bad English got. 

"Fly to Cambodia," he'd recall, toking on a Camel. "Weather, no good."

"Drop maaany many bomb."

"Boom."

I started barricading the backdoor, but somehow he'd always find a way in. One time, when I when we came back from a holiday, Mr Hiep had decided to paint the inside of our house a very disturbing peachy salmon, without asking us. He'd also taken it upon himself to install an expensive and extremely garish water feature in the house, which made smoke come out of a fountain when you turned it on, and had a ball rolling in the smoke and water with disco lights shining everywhere. I could handle this seriously Western decor faux pas (yet what was probably the height of fashion in Tan Binh, Ward 7 at that time); however, what got me was Mr Hiep then decided that we needed to pay for all of it because he had done us the favour of painting the place and installing the smoking water contraption! He also decided to increase our rent by $100 because our house now had “added value”!

One day, I asked Mr Hiep to send someone to clean the air conditioners, I got home to find him sucking on the air-con exhaust pipe, spitting out the dirty water into a bucket. 

The last straw was when my housemate and I started noticing our utilities bills going up every month, even though we didn’t use more electricity or water. It took me a while to investigate, but I finally solved the mystery. Mr Hiep had plugged in his very large aquarium into our power plugs in the backyard. Not only that, but he’d also plugged in his washing machine to use our electricity and water!

We decided to move out to a more honest/sane place. When we told Mr Hiep, he couldn’t understand why, but immediately started showing possible tenants through the house, again at the worse times! I’d be lying in bed on Sunday morning when suddenly and unannounced four people would poke their heads around the corner and start walking through my bedroom and bathroom, expecting the place, poking their head into my closet, turning the shower on to check the water pressure, and such antics.

I guarantee you that if you ask any foreigner living here, all of them would have a story of a crazy landlord. It’s one of those things which makes living here in Vietnam so random and unexpected and one of the reasons I love it so much, even though it is infuriating at the time. We all need our Mr Hiep story.

*This is not his real name for privacy purposes. I also don't want him to hunt me down and find myself waking up in a bathtub full of ice sans three toes and a kidney.

Originally written for Doanh Nhân Sài Gòn

Thing's I've eaten

With time running out in the country I’ve come to love with a smirk on my face and a tasty banh mi in the hand, I’ve started reminiscing on the things I’ve seen, eaten, and experienced, places I’ve been, people I’ve laughed with and at and all the fillings in between that make everything just, well, bloody good. Now, I’m not trying to compare myself with Andrew Zimmern, but I think it would be worth diarising, before I forget it, some of the random things I’ve managed to put in my mouth, but not always managed to keep down. Caz and anyone who hasn’t experienced the crunchy, juicy goodness of a feathered, baby duck foetus crackling between their molars look away now. From the top.

· Snake. Cobra snake. Head to tail. Bile and blood in shots and crunchy bones. All of it. It had beady eyes so it had to go.

· Fried black scorpion. Tasted like bacon.

· Ox penis. Cartilagy grossness.

· Goat hotpot with pig’s brains. Erm, well, in hindsight I’m not sure the brains needed to be added.

· That fermented duck egg with the little baby (beak intact) inside – hot vit lon it’s called around here – and the worst part, the part that hits the gag reflex, isn’t actually the bits with substance, it’s the sauce that floats on top when you crack it open. It’s like the eggiest omelette you’ve ever had. Like a hundred eggs concentrated in one – very potent.

· A big duck head.


· Fried chicken feet. They chow these in South Africa too – in Kayamandi they call them walky-talkies because you can tie a string around them and wear them around your neck.

· A nice cup of intestine and innards soup. I’m not actually sure what animal it was though.

· A few metres worth of grilled eel. My friend Danga actually has a bit of a thing for these eels and tends to order them whenever they’re available. As well as fish. Lots of them. Jesus can be glad Danga wasn't around when he pulled that stunt with the bread and fish cause disciple John may have had to omit that certain miracle from the good book if he was.


· Frogs. Crumbed and fried in butter, they taste like fishy chicken.

· Some kind of fowl. We’ve actually had this twice at a local restaurant around the corner. The waiter brings it live to the table to make sure that THIS is the bird you’d like to have slaughtered (quite unnecessary, really) and then about an hour later the poultry dishes start arriving. First the heart, liver and kidneys, then then some other random bits and then the rest of it. Not my favourite.

· There were also a few beery nights of quail eggs and pigeon.

· Wild boar and deer, grilled at your table, by yourself, seasoned in five secret spices.

· Some random tropical fruit like durian – which Sarah says taste like meat and onions and even gets the before-mentioned Bizarre Foods host squirming. It’s an acquired taste. My mate alan wasn't a fan either as far as I remember. Now that I think of it, I don't know anyone who's really a fan.

· A variety of crustaceans and snail, round and corckscrewed, thumbnail size and fist sized, raw and cooked, slurpy and very slurpy, funky and funkmeister G.

· Bits and pieces of crocodile, kangaroo, lots of rabbit and I don’t know what else. And that’s just in Vietnam! That’s not even including the salted grasshoppers in Thailand or the yak butter, steak and cheese in Nepal, etc.

Oh and for the record, I’m not a fan of munching down feathered little friends, but I did it and I burned some joss sticks to Uncle Scrooge and the Duck Tales cousins after that little incident to atone for my heartless curiosity. My mate Christoff took the easy approach and just puked in the nearest pot plant.

April Photoblog

I spotted this wonderful Tsunami Warning off Back Beach on Thuy Van Street in Vung Tau. I love the random cut-out collection of joggers casually making their way along the beach, oblivious to the gigantic set of waves about to engulf them. 10/10 to the designer!

Portmanteau, Easter and the Jabberwocky

*I interrupt this April photoblog to bring you a little insight into how my brain works...sometimes when it's working*

Sir John Tenniel's March Hare and Mad Hatter

I've been reading all these blog posts about Easter while I'm up to my Adam's Apple in work, and supposed to be researching and writing a story for the International Kite Festival which took place in Vung Tau two weeks ago. Easter, by the way, is sort of a non-event in terms of commercialism in Vietnam. I do miss all the chocolate bunnies and such, but I appreciate not being bombarded with Easter madness sales at the shops. Secondly, I'm busy reading Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll (which incidentally features a bunny who dabbles in madness) and just got to the part where Alice is talking to Humpty Dumpty and he's explaining the meaning of the poem Jabberwocky by means of portmanteau - using two words to make a new one. For example, slithy = lithe and slimy and mimsy = flimsy and miserable.

So all these random facts and things collide in my brain and I've just figured out that if I were to eat liquer-filled Easter eggs until I pass out and the next day I had a hangover, it would be...wait for it...Passover.

Any new portmanteaus anyone?

Weigh me a Nordic bum tea

My girlfriend and I live in a little alleyway just off fourteen-laned Dien Bien Phu Street, one of the main west-to-eat thoroughfares of the city. Every day we open our balcony doors to let in some fresh air as it’s just plain nicer than a stuffy house. But what inevitably also drifts in, are the sounds and calls of the hawkers and recycling ladies plying their trade down our alley. This doesn’t sound like much, until you take into consideration that they come around at a rate of about one every ten minutes in the morning, shouting indeterminable things or making strange noises. It’s always great fun when we have friends or family visiting from abroad who aren’t use to the randomness of it all. Let me break it down for you:

I’m sitting in the living room when suddenly I hear, from a distance, and in an impossibly high and fragile voice: “Weigh a bum me Nordic teaaa!” and then a little closer and a little louder…“Weigh a bum me Nordic teaaa!” Fret not, as it isn’t Thor or Odin asking for the dimensions on your anal excretions, it is but an old conical-hatted lady trollying her mobile bakery of fresh breads, buns and cakes down our alley. This morning I was lucky enough to witness two on the same turf, coming from opposite directions. I thought there might be a showdown, there were tell-tale signs; a glint of a fresh croissant in the one’s pocket, an itchy-baguette finger on the other, a Swiss roll tumbling across the alley. Alas, they stopped for an amicable chat and a taste of each other’s wares.

As they depart, along comes another high-pitched wavering call: “Get ya-ya! Get ya-ya!” Ya-ya? Like the sisterhood with their divine secrets? Not for me thanks. Actually, it’s the recycling lady asking if anybody has any plastic bottles, cardboard or dirty secrets they would like recycled. We wash our own dirty secrets, thanks.

Some of them don’t even have to say anything. There’s the ubiquitous caramba man who comes along on a bicyle with a “sshka sshka sshka” of his shaker. He’s offering cup massages, which leave you looking like a leopard with leprosy, but also a business card with the directions to some other contraband services, or so I’ve heard.

Then, along cycles the Olé-type ice-cream man, who has a car battery hooked up to a looped player with speakers, all taped to his bike and busting out a trademark tune for the kiddies, with a massive cooler box on the back. Those are the modern ice-cream sellers. The old school ones still just pedal along and ring a bell, advertising their chin mau or nine colours of ice-cream with traditional flavours like young rice and green bean.

There’s also the spoon-banging soup lady, fruit-sellers, feather-duster purveyors, various bangers, clangers, shouters, ringers and the one who sounds like a tortured, electrocuted cat that just won’t confess. She's one of the people who walks around with nothing to sell , chanting random slogans or something, which is confusing and slightly unnerving. Maybe she works for the government

Most of the hawkers just sound like they are absolutely insane, that is, if what they said was actually in English.Our favourite is a man who comes along at least three times a day, again with a hooked up, homemade sound-system. “I’ve lost my car! Help me find my car! My Car!” On loop. Every five seconds. Thrice daily. Without fail. Either he is really determined to find his missing automobile or he has the memory of a goldfish. It must mean a lot to him. A lot… We have a chuckle every time he comes along. “Have you seen his car yet, honey?” “No, not yet, I hope he finds it soon.” "Yes, I do hope so." He’s actually selling Banh Chung, a traditional Vietnamese snack of peppered pork and green bean wrapped in leaves, very popular in the period leading up to Tet (Lunar New Year).

According to our friends Dave and Nat, they had a daily hawker come round their alley where they used to live with the creed of “Vagaaaaaiiina! Vagaaaaaiiina!” Wonder what she was selling.

One of those things that make your day...

I was checking out Sticky Rice, one of my favourite blogs by far, when I found this little beaut in the comments. So maybe I enjoy toilet humour, like a good fart, and have the mentality of a five-year old, but stupid things like this give me a chuckle and make my day. Let me be.

Who calls themselves "male penis"? Isn't that a bit of tautology? Male. Penis. What, as opposed to a female penis? That's like calling yourself "Doos Steve Hofmeyer", or "Idiot Bush" - no need for the repetition. I mean, I understand if it was a spam ad, or a comment on a porn site or something, but this is a serious, albeit grammatically uncouth, comment about blogging on a post about a bloody omelette. I love it. Sorry about that.