We attended a Filipino worship service in Saigon today.
The Filipino churches I’ve attended don’t have hymnals, they have “praise songs” projected onto the wall for the congregation and a “worship team” of singers and musicians. This team is made up mostly of singers and musicians who perform in the hotels and clubs of Saigon. A little louder than our choir and congregation! They rock the place, rather like the music in a black church in America.
It’s so interesting to see how differently people worship!
One of many great meals in Bien Hoa – fresh greens are essential to Vietnamese cooking and eating.
We sit in a shady, spacious sidewalk café on the corner of two streets in a low rise residential neighborhood of Bien Hoa, the industrial zone half an hour north of Saigon. An important river port and the home to hundreds of manufacturers – many of overseas brands – it is one of Vietnam’s most prosperous cities.
Our friend Bao is one of the prosperous. He owns land and houses in Bien Hoa and Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). We are staying in his house opposite this café. His black Mercedes is parked in the street level garage, flanked by four motorcycles along the wall. As we sit here, Bao can survey the business in his gold and jewelry store via his android phone, which lives streams eight channels of video cam in the store.
We come here to enjoy his company and the great food, also to rest. We can spend most of the day here in the café, reading or catching up on e-mail. The café offers one of many wireless networks in the neighborhood. In the morning, 100 people sit around small plastic tables enjoying coffee, tea, checkers and conversation. Most of them are men. Many, I’m told, make money in smuggling and the black market – common businesses in port cities all over the world.
Development in Vietnam has come at a stunning pace. Sometimes it is ugly. Certainly it has come at a high price for those who have lost their land, and to the land itself. We are now enjoying its most pleasant side, a prosperous and peaceful neighborhood built 8 years ago on rice fields.
I realize that one of the most pleasant sides of this brief interlude is that we are the only non-Vietnamese in this neighborhood, and the only ones I see in the town. Tourists must not come to Bien Hoa. Everything that is here is made for the Vietnamese who live here.
It is almost 10AM in Silang, Lina’s home town in the province of Cavite south of Metro Manila. We have been awake since 4:30 (?) when the chorus of roosters began. A decade of coq au vin every night might change the early morning wake up call. (There are hundreds of roosters within 200 meters of our house.) But that would be a shame. The roosters tell me we really have arrived in our second home.
It is fiesta in Silang for the next four days. One early sign was a parade of “bakla”, gay men dressed in red, dancing to the beat of a small band of drummers, one of them breathing fire. Small town America is not treated to such spectacles. Once again, I know I am in the Philippines.
Lina and I had a very good week in southern California and Nevada, traveling somewhat over 1000 miles to see friends from many different times of our lives and in many different places.
We arrived from Los Angeles yesterday. The flight was long, about 32 hours from LAX to Manila with stops in Tokyo and Singapore. We have arrived healthy and relatively well rested, with the excitement and uncertainty that I remember from previous trips. While this is not the same kind of unknown that Linda and I leaped into when we left for China, the Philippines and Vietnam, there still is an unknown. What will we create here? How will our lives change in these months ahead, and how will that ripple into our life in New Hampshire?
Journeys 