Posting from a hotel in Danang...

I left Hoi An this afternoon. Totals include: 2 tailored shirts, 3 bowls of cao lau, 2 cups (glasses) of coffee, 1 trip to the beach, 4 round-trips across the river, 0 souvenirs. I really like it there. If I could find a portable job or save up enough to retire (if I lived out in the countryside it might not take too much!), I could live there. All I need is a sit-down toilet and high-speed Internet.

I'm flying back home tomorrow afternoon but will try to see a bit of Danang before I go. It seems like a worthwhile city, but few tourists spend much time here.

First full day in Hoi An brings these comments:

• My bowl of cao lầu today was much better than the one last night. The restaurant last night smelled like wet dogs. And I don't think they were really open, they were just willing to cook so they could take in some more money.

• The weather was beautiful all day, but there was a pretty big drop in temperature between the morning and evening. In the morning, the sun was unrelenting and it felt like it must be in the 90°s. By late afternoon the breeze picked up and it started to cool off, and at night it was probably in the 60°s (not unpleasantly).

• There's been a lot of development in Hoi An since the last time I was here, but most of it seems to be well-considered and planned. The tourist-friendly area has expanded across the river, but the new buildings (I think they're new) mostly retain a traditional Hoi An architecture and look like they belong there. Streets have been paved and widened, but it still feels like a quaint little town.

• I noticed in the menu at the cao lầu restaurant that they had a page devoted to pizza. In the descriptions of the pizzas, one said something like "comes from the name of a valley in Italy, where our chef is from." I doubted that there was an Italian chef working back in the kitchen, but it was a big, fairly upscale restaurant and I thought maybe it was possible that some Italian (maybe a backpacker) had worked there at some point and had started the Pizza Corner of the menu. But then a few hours later, out at a shack restaurant at the beach, I noticed that the menu also had a Pizza Corner, which also had the line about the valley in Italy that their chef was from. So I suppose there are just dozens of restaurants in Hoi An that have copied their menu from the same source. Or there is an unaccountably large Italian expat community here in the culinary industry.

Tết keeps rolling along. I guess this was day 4. According to the national labor code, only the first three days of Tết (plus the last day of the old year) are official holidays, but because the last day of the lunar year was a Sunday, the entire country got today off as an "in lieu of" holiday. (Except for those working for private companies, or working for themselves.)

I'll just fill this space with another "what I did today" post since the days have not yet become routine and I don't have any deep thoughts about anything.

Today I didn't really do much.

Actually, I was out of the house a good portion of the day, but I slept in, didn't do anything novel, and didn't see too many people. I went to The Sushi Bar for lunch with my friend Eileen, who's down here from Saigon, then we had coffee and took a leisurely ride through District 2 (the mansion district) on my motorbike. After a short nap and dinner at home, I went to karaoke at the Lam Son swimming pool club with Phil and his wiferlriend and Eileen.

The Lam Son pool might seem like a strange place go go for karaoke (I think the karaoke rooms might actually be in a basement underneath the pool), but it is still cheap ($5 an hour), has a good book of English songs, and is much less sketchy than it seems from the outside. It looks like it's going to be a mafia hangout, or a place where they parade miniskirted girls through your room so you can pick your "companion," or a place where your motorbike is mysteriously missing when you leave, but it's actually a family-friendly, low-pressure establishment (they don't even encourage you to buy drinks) that just hasn't had a single upgrade since 2002.

Of course, to Phil and me, 2002-2003 in Vietnam has become sort of a lost paradise; we're always looking for things that remind us of what Vietnam was like when we first got here, when we formed our first deep impressions. (Which have all become fond, even if they weren't necessarily good.) The Lam Son pool complex reminds me of cheap lawnchairs, people working 28 days a month for $60, crumbling sidewalks, seed-strewn floors, chickens roaming the street, bathrooms without toilet paper, strong coffee, men urinating on trees, and music by the Carpenters. Good times, good times.

The Saigon Heat played their first-ever home game tonight — the first real pro basketball game in the 4,000-year history of Vietnam, I imagine — and I was there to see it. The Heat play in the 3-year-old ASEAN Basketball League, which seems to be owned by AirAsia and has eight teams in six Southeast Asian countries. Vietnam, via the Saigon Heat*, joined the league this season and played their first game 10 days ago in Bangkok.

* There doesn't seem to be any controversy about this team being called the Saigon Heat instead of the Ho Chi Minh City Heat. So if your knowledge of post-war Vietnam tells you that the communist government will become enraged if you refer to HCMC by its old name, "Saigon"... well, you're wrong. They don't really care.

In the ABL, each team is permitted to have up to five "imports" on their 12-man roster. Two of them can be citizens of other ASEAN/Southeast Asian countries (90% of the time this means the Philippines), one of them can be from anywhere in the world as long as he has at least one Southeast Asian parent, and two can be from non-ASEAN countries (which always means the U.S.). So it seems that every ABL team has two black guys that are the team's best players.

In the game tonight, Saigon Heat vs. Singapore Slingers (I kinda like that name!), each team's American and Filipino imports basically played the whole game, with the fifth spot rotating between "local" players. And the local players were pretty lousy.

One of Saigon's American players, Julius Hodge, actually had a "cup of coffee" (as they say in baseball) in the NBA, getting into 23 games over two seasons. It's possible he's the only player in the whole league with NBA experience. (He is almost certainly the only player in the league with NBA experience who also almost died in a drive-by highway shooting.) Hodge was named the ACC's Player of the Year in his junior year at N.C. State and was taken in the first round of the NBA draft, and he's only 28 years old. Looking at his resume, I figured he would dominate in this league. But tonight he didn't. He didn't really look that great, though I'm sure he wasn't going full-out (and you probably shouldn't when you're forced to play every minute of every game).

Some impressions from Vietnam's first foray into professional basketball:

• The crowd was pretty good. The gym was about 75% full and people seemed to be paying attention and enjoying the game. They got a couple of cheers going and actually got loud a few times. They're not the savviest basketball fans yet, but they seemed to at least have a general sense of the rules, and what was good and what was bad.

• However, there were still a few oddities. For example, at the beginning of the game, the fans were clapping after each basket, no matter which team scored. I think this faded away later when they realized it was OK to be partisan. They also paid a little bit too much attention to free throws. Made free throws got huge applause, while missed free throws got the loudest hoots of derision of the night. Dunks and 3-point shots also seemed to be over-appreciated, but obviously dunks are still quite a novelty in a country where the average adult male is about 5'4".

• The stadium crew could use a few pointers. The main host/MC (who I think was a guy I used to play basketball with) did a pretty good job with his "Make some noise!" cheers, and when he was throwing free T-shirts into the stands, the crowd probably got the loudest it was all night. But the sound system was awful. The national anthems were strings of squawks and feedback, and the (female) announcer, whose microphone was already turned up to 11, insisted on screaming all of her lines, which weren't very useful to begin with. "Two points for red [Singapore]! Three points for White [Saigon], number five [didn't even say the players' names]! Two free throws [which she pronounced as "three threws"]!" They could get rid of her, or at least tone her down. The dance team, the "Saigon Hot Girls" (yes, really), were doing sexy MTV-circa-2001 dances while wearing unsexy high-top sneakers and ill-fitting dresses (probably designed by the morality police) over spandex shorts.

Overall, I had a lot of fun, even though I went by myself and got overcharged for my ticket. (I won't even mention what happened.) If I lived in Saigon I think I would go to every game.

OK, posting on two consecutive days isn't so hard, though this is backdated by a few minutes as I didn't get home until almost midnight. Here's what I did for the first two days of Tết:

Day 1

• Slept in until after 10 a.m.

• Met Basketball An for coffee at a place nearby that didn't close for the holiday. There were surprisingly many places open. I remember the first year I was here for Tết, it seemed like nothing was open on the first day, and a lot of places were closed for a whole week. That has been changing over the years, as people realize that money is much better than family and tradition! (But seriously, I'm all in favor of the trend.)

• Had the first meal of the year at my favorite phở place in Saigon. Is it the best? I don't know. But it tastes the most like American phở of any place I've been in Vietnam.

• Parked myself at another open cafe — one of the giant glitzy ones that were all the rage in the previous decade — and wrote yesterday's entry and caught up on some iPad stuff (we don't have Wi-Fi at home, sadly).

• Came home and studied some Vietnamese for about half an hour. (That's one of my resolutions — to get back on the Vietnamese-language horse that I seem to fall off every time I stay in Hanoi.)

• Went over to Phil's house for a New Year's Day party with some of his foreign English-teacher friends. It is very rare that I go to a party and feel like the coolest (and handsomest) person in the room, but this was one of those times. A couple of the guys were nice, but there was a lot of complaining and swearing and sweating and no-you-did-not-just-say-that going on. I'm glad I am not of that world.

Day 2

• Woke up at 8 a.m., not so happily.

• Greeted the first two guests of the day, Uncle Kiet and Uncle [don't remember his name, but I've seen him a lot]. Both of them are Dad's cousins on his father's side. (I think!) Following ancient Vietnamese traditions, we finished a bottle of Chivas Regal with Uncle 9 (who usually doesn't drink much). I have to tell you, I am not a big fan of drinking liquor at 9 a.m. It is not the best way to start a day.

• TOOK A NAP.

• Prologue: There's a small hotel right beside our house, back in the alleys. On New Year's Eve, as Cousin TA and I were leaving to go to his grandmother's, a white guy walked out of the hotel and I did a double-take as I realized that I knew him. "Hi!" I said, and he reactively said "Hi" in return before doing his own double-take and realizing that I wasn't just some fellow foreigner being friendly. It was J, a Danish guy that I play basketball with in Hanoi. Calling him a "friend" might be a bit of a stretch, as we had never hung out away from basketball, but I always liked him and we got along well on the court. It was a completely random and unlikely meeting. Realize there are millions of people in HCMC; we live in an area that is lightly touristed, especially by foreigners; our house and the hotel are down an alley that you probably wouldn't go down unless you knew where and why you were going; and I probably spend a total of about 2 minutes a day at the door — usually I just roll the bike out and take off. So the odds of running into someone I know in front of our house, someone who wasn't intentionally coming to our house, and who I didn't even know was in the city, are awfully low, surely.

Anyway, we exchanged numbers and agreed to meet sometime over the next two days. So this afternoon I joined J for coffee back in the alleys at a very "local" place he had found on the ground floor of a tenement, where we witnessed real-live cockfighting (actually, he saw it, and I just missed it — it wasn't to the death, thankfully) and had coffee at 2004 prices.

• Drove out to District 7 — the New City Center — to go exploring. (J's been in Hanoi for 5 years but is not that familiar with Ho Chi Minh City, and I thought District 7 would be a nice outing for him.) It is very different out there. The streets are wide, straight, and traffic-free, the air is clean and fresh, and there's actual landscaping. I think I've written about this before, but when you're in District 7, you could be anywhere (nice) in the world — Shanghai, Singapore, Sydney, Toronto, etc. This is mostly good, I guess — Vietnamese people are enjoying greater levels of comfort — but also bad because it does leach some of the "Vietnam-ness" from Vietnam and it would be a shame if the whole city turned into District 7. But it's good to have a "nice" area where you can "get away from it all" once in a while.

• Came back downtown and met Phil for coffee/dinner at a Japanese cafe with an extensive library of Japanese books. (Worthless to me, but I'm sure some people like it!) We had a nice long chat and I think it was good for Phil to spend time with two people who are positive about Vietnam, instead of complaining English teachers (a group which, admittedly, often includes him). The cafe was right across from a newly opened Domino's Pizza, and I have to tell you the smell of the pizza was fantastic. I will go there.

• Went to eat seafood with Basketball An (just the two of us) to close out the day. We sat by a troupe of ladyboys. (Well, not entirely ladyboys, but feminine young men wearing makeup and fabulous clothes.)

• Got home just before midnight, and 45 minutes before Cousin TA, who I just opened the door for a few minutes ago.

I'm overdue for a check-in here, so I thought I should crank out a few words. Today is my father's 70th birthday, which I've been told is a very significant birthday in Vietnamese culture and I've also been told is not a very significant birthday in Vietnamese culture. One of those is bound to be correct. It's definitely a big round number, at least. (I'm heading for a big round number of my own in four months.)

I really wish we could all be home to celebrate with him, but I was just home for three weeks over Christmas and New Year's and one of the realities of being a responsible grown-up is that you can't always do the things you want to do. I can't take a five-week vacation and I can't afford to fly home for a weekend. And I certainly don't mean to complain about my rather flexible work situation, which did, after all, allow me to come home for three weeks while only using five days of annual leave.

Anyway, what's more important than my HR records is that we all need to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Dad! May we all be as healthy, active and mentally acute (but hopefully taller and with more hair) when we turn 70. We bought him a new bike as a gift. Perhaps he'll post some pictures of it online for all of you to see. (Or perhaps he already posted to Facebook, which I am once again rarely accessing.) I think he'll get quite a lot of use out of the bike. He already does a lot of walking, even though from our house you can walk to nowhere in particular. With his bike, he'll be able to occasionally ride into Portland or Sunfield, where he can stop for a cappuccino or to buy a pack of gum.

In case you were wondering, here's what's going on with me at the moment:

• The entire country of Vietnam is getting ready for Tết, the lunar new year. Sunday will be the last day of the old year, Monday will be "New Year's Day." Everyone gets four days of vacation, so naturally a large share of them take a fifth day off, which works out to nine days of vacation when you add in the bookend weekends. ["Bookend weekends" — I challenge you to create another sentence in English that repeats "-kend" words back to back!]

• I flew from Hanoi to Saigon on Thursday night, then worked from the Saigon office today (Friday). As you can probably guess, this means that I will be celebrating Tết in Saigon, with my family. It has been seven years since the last time I did this! So I'm looking forward to it, even though I remember it being really exciting for about one day and then deadly boring for the next four.

• I'll work in the Saigon office again next Friday (I'm saving vacation days), then on Friday night I will fly up to Danang to spend the weekend in Hoi An, perhaps my favorite tourist spot in Vietnam. (And another thing I have not done in seven years.)

• After that I will return to Hanoi, though I still don't know for how long. Every time I come down to Saigon I am pretty sure that this is where I'd rather be, but for work reasons it probably makes more sense to stay in Hanoi, and I do feel like I owe it to my boss to do what's best for him and the company. (He has never said that he'd prefer I stay in Hanoi, but I know it would be better for him.)

I've been hearing a lot about this "no eating after 7 p.m." phenomenon lately — I guess it's one of those weight-loss fads, but I suspect it's a reasonably healthy [translation for Greg: healthful] and effective one. First, for the obvious reason that you will most likely eat less in a day if you have a smaller eating window. (Sure, some people will calorie-cram at 6 p.m. in anticipation of the evening fast, but most people will reduce their daily food intake with this policy.) Second, Wii Fit taught me that your body doesn't digest as fast while you're asleep, so you should avoid eating (especially carbohydrates) right before you go to bed. If you stop eating at 7 and go to bed at midnight, most of the hard work of digestion will already be done and you will more quickly poop out your calories instead of storing them as fat. Or something. I'm not a nutritionist.

Anyway, I'm not going to do this. It doesn't fit my lifestyle. But as a substitute "get healthy/lose weight" resolution, I've decided that I'm going to avoid elevators this year (month? (week?)). Walking upstairs is great exercise, and even walking downstairs is better than just standing in one place and letting gravity do the work.

This mostly pertains to my office, which is on the fourth floor, within reasonable climbing range. (If I move to Saigon, where our office is on the 12th floor, I will seriously rethink this policy.) The only problem is that motorbike parking is in the basement, and there are no stairs from the basement to the first floor — you have to walk back up the vehicle ramp, go outside, and re-enter the building. My apartment is on the third floor of a building with no elevator, so I'm stair-climbing there by default.

Five days a week I will be climbing the equivalent of (at least) 8 flights of stairs: going up to the office in the morning (+3), going back up to the office after lunch (+3), and going up to my room at the end of the day (+2). Most days I will go up to my room at least twice, adding up to 11 flights, and climbing 11 flights of stairs a day may not be much, but it ain't nothin'.

I guess I won't be quixotically trying to post every day this year. That ship has sailed. (Have at it, globalesque!) But I should probably give you all an update about what's going on with me. So here are a few assorted tidbits.

1. I flew back to Vietnam on Jan. 6, leaving Grand Rapids very early in the morning. (Thanks for getting up early, parents!) I think I was carrying more things in my luggage for other people than for myself.

There was a potentially major problem at the Grand Rapids airport when I found out my name was printed in reverse order (last name and first name swapped) on my ticket from Asiana Airlines. I know that they always say you have to be VERY CAREFUL to make sure your name is written EXACTLY AS IT APPEARS on your passport or you WON'T BE ALLOWED TO FLY. (Thanks, 9/11!) However, this has happened to me several times before in Asia, and every time I conscientiously notified the airline and asked for a correction, they said "Oh, it's not a problem. As long as all the parts of your name are there, it doesn't matter what order they're in." So I grew to believe this was the case.

BUT NOT IN THE U.S., APPARENTLY. No, they really will not let you fly as Huynh Minh Huu Eric, who is clearly an identity thief and terrorist.

The woman at the counter was actually very sympathetic and helpful (this has not always been my experience at GRR, or with airport personnel in general) but we had to call Asiana Airlines and were put on hold for a long time, then lost a connection, then called back and were put on hold again, and by the time the ticket was fixed and reissued, my plane was already boarding. Luckily I didn't miss it.

The rest of my 32-hour trip was completely incident-free, though I stand by my conviction that Chicago's O'Hare Airport has the lamest, most boring international terminal in the civilized world. And I had to spend 6 hours there. (And then I only got 1 hour at marvelous Incheon! Unfair!)

2. Pleasant surprise: I didn't get to the bottom of my stack of Entertainment Weeklys while I was home, so I brought the remaining issues with me. I finished two or three before I got to Incheon, then I ordered a bowl of udon at the airport and cracked open the issue with Kermit the Frog on the cover, promoting the new Muppets movie (something I really wanted to read about). Somehow, after finishing my noodles, I walked away from the table, sat down in the waiting area, pulled out my iPad to check email, and totally forgot I had been actively reading a magazine. I must have left it in the restaurant. I looked back at the table and Kermit was long gone, of course, so I was sad/miffed/irritated that I wouldn't be able to continue my uninterrupted EW-reading streak that must now be approaching 18 years.

OK, that's not the pleasant surprise. The pleasant surprise is that when I went to the EW website to report a "missing or damaged issue" and ask for a free replacement (OK, I was sort of cheating), I saw that they had finally released a tablet app for the magazine in late November. This is wonderfully good news for me, the guy living overseas who reads EW religiously even if that means consuming a stack of 45 magazines in a month. Now I can read the issues over here as they come out, I won't have the (self-imposed) pressure to do so much reading on my visits home, and I won't have to worry about leaving Kermit at the Incheon airport. Good news all around. And the app is quite well-done, a near-perfect replica of the printed magazine with all the same content, including pictures. I don't know why it took so long, but at least they did a good job with it. And, oh yeah, free to subscribers. This is the future of magazines.

3. After spending two days in Saigon — celebrating Cousin TA's birthday on Sunday, going to work and picking up my company laptop on Monday — I flew back to Hanoi. Needing an immediate and temporary place to stay, I had earlier discovered to my mild surprise that my old apartment was still vacant and they would be happy to let me move back in, even for just a month, so I went there straight from the airport.

Now, despite thinking that this year would be a "fresh start," I am — temporarily, at least — back working at the same desk, living in the same apartment and even riding the same motorbike! (I had a rental delivered to my office on Tuesday and it turned out to be the very same bike I had been driving for 6 months last year.) Maybe the fresh start will begin at Tet. And maybe I'll even start another posting streak.

4. People in Hanoi always complain about how cold it is in the winter. I've never fully experienced it. The first year I lived here I arrived at the end of February, the second year it was the end of March, and last year it was the beginning of June. (Asterisk: When my whole family came back to Vietnam the first time, we visited Hanoi for a couple of days during the first week of January, but I don't remember it being cold at all. In fact, I'm pretty sure I have pictures of us walking around in short-sleeved shirts.) I've experienced many varieties of miserable weather here, but nothing that ever made me think, "Man alive, no one can bear this infernal cold!" ("Infernal cold" = oxymoron?)

So far, it's been pretty cold, but nothing really extreme yet. I mean, I just came back from Michigan. The problem here is not so much the temperature (it rarely dips down below the low 40s), but the combination of low temperature, high humidity, unheated houses, and the fact that we go everywhere on motorbikes. Oh, and we never see the sun.