Nước - Water

Status update:

1. Riffing Indochina now plays well with IE. Spent 4 hours yesterday futzing with a brand new set of programming code to make the blog look exactly like it did before. Same skin, new chassis.
2. Not really a status update, but I don't think I've posted anything about food since my run in with the runs. Mike says I gotta pick myself up and get back on the horse.
3. Headed to Thailand with the family for a week in July. Will still be posting, 97 and-a-half percent positive.

Droplets of water coalesce
on a lotus leaf.

The word nước is the Vietnamese word for water. It forms the root for many compound words, such as the fluids of the body like tears (eye water), mucus, (nose water), and saliva (bubbly water). Some of the compound words are idiomatic expressions. Directly translated, nước trong and nước độc mean clean water and foul water respectively. However, the connotation refers to a married couple and the state of their relationship, whether the relationship is an easy one, or if it takes a lot of effort to sustain. Finally, the word nước is a homonym for country. Considering Vietnam's coastal location and riverine countryside, I imagine the word country takes the meaning: a place where there is water. But that's an uneducated guess on my part.

It's Wednesday--water delivery day. From the stairwell comes loud resonant booms. The delivery person is hauling five-gallon bottles up the flights of stairs before dropping the bottles -ka-choum- on the landing for each floor. He carried the first one up six flights. Then the next one up five, then four, and so on. Each bottle weighs 40 pounds, so this guy must have legs of pure steel cable and the heart of a horse. Once each apartment has a blue bottle of clear water waiting outside the door, he speeds off on his scooter, the same scooter that hauled an eighth of a ton of water to our place.

Having water delivered is a new thing for me. Generally, everything about water is strange and unfamiliar here. The way we get it, what we do with it. We fill ice trays from the waterbottle stand, and we might refill them three times a day. The 220 volt rice cooker comes to a boil in a flash; we go from washing the rice to eating it at the table in 10 minutes flat. There's a cream colored hose with a spray nozzle, hanging from a fixture on the grey tile wall next to the toilet, to provide a specific service in lieu of toilet tissue (although happy to say the plumbing in this house does possess the capability to handle toilet paper--a capability that most household toilets in Southeast Asia lack).

All around the apartment, water is everywhere like beautiful little microclimates. Dishes drying in the chrome rack mounted to the wall above the sink send droplets like rain down on the sink counter. The muddy, still water in the pot holding Lữ's lotus has duckweed floating on the surface--a perfect miniature pond. And every day the monsoons send down relentless torrents of water that pelt the clay tile and corrogated tin rooves, gather in holding tanks until full, then spill out and down to the courtyard to merge into rushing grey rivers underfoot.

The tops of our neighbors's houses look like water-harvesting setups.

And other aspects of water are so unique to this place. On the roof, you can see dragonflies, born of water, darting about after a rain. There on the roof, the chrome holding tank feeds the solar hot water heater, which in turn supplies our entire building with scalding water when the day is at its hottest, and cold water all night. Then on the ground floor, there is the terraced fountain, nestled in the terrarium window garden in our building's front entrance. It fills the first two floors of the house with the hum of the pump and the tinkle of trickling water. And then there's the retching sound. At first I thought it was the hacking coughs of old man fighting a losing battle with lung infection. Then thought it to be the horrible crowing sound of a bird, like a raven, sitting jealous guard upon its nest. However, I just discovered the retching noise belongs to our neighbor--a nice guy, really--who after his meals, sticks his head out the back window of his kitchen, runs water from a spigot that pokes out of the wall across from his window, and gargles from it, religiously, for several minutes at a time, several times a day. The noise echoes up the alley to our kitchen window.

I suppose the most significant aspect of water is the stuff we use for eating and drinking. We drink a lot of the stuff, maybe close to a gallon each day. Thankfully, the bottled stuff is not too expensive, although I'm aware it's a luxury and privilege most of the Vietnamese could not afford. But we prefer the bottled and fossil-fuel transported water over the water that flows from the tap.

This is not to give you the impression that we're water snobs. I know what water snobs are--folks who play right into the hands of the marketers and advertisers who expound in no uncertain terms that bottled water will make you smarter, sexier, and more powerful, and it won't kill you like tap water will. Drink Dasani for life and snub your nose at your tap, so say we all.

I've heard some of our bottled water in the states is supposedly just municipal water with a 3,000 percent markup in price. Here in Vietnam however, municipal water is a different story. The toxins and bacteria in this tap water can and do make people sick. With my own eyes, I can testify there's more that comes through the water lines than water. When the solid clear trunk of water flowing from our sink faucet depreciated to a loose splattery spray, I took the fixture apart to fix it. Peering into the cap, I found the filter screen clogged with all sorts of gunk and debris that came straight from the water system.

That was just the big stuff. The little stuff invariably makes it into the sink, to the place where we wash our dishes and rinse our food. As germ theory holds, bacteria multiply like rabbits with an itch. So not to let standing water sit on our cleaned dishes, we obsessive-compulsively arrange them in the drainrack for optimal air exposure. That seems to do the trick.

I still don't think we're tap water snobs. We do drink Saigon water. Since it's a risk, we filter the water through carbon, then sterilize it on our gas stove. The problem with heating the water is we still end up using fossil fuel. Can't seem to get around that one. And, as a terribly unwelcome side effect, the heat from the stove turns the apartment into a sauna. I might make a couple cups of cà phê sữa đá a day (with water from the filter, not the bottle). But there is a terrible trade-off of sweet, sweet, cà phê for a miserably hot room.

Cải Thìa

Tap water plays yet another key role: for rinsing fruit and veggies. And boy do they need it. Mike rinsed bunches of cải thìa three times the other day, and still, there was so much sand in the bowl of water on the third time, it made me think of a miner panning for gold. Once the dirt is removed though, we still have to deal with contamination. Before coming to market, veggies get washed in the river and pick up infectious bacteria, according to one study. So, we sterilize the fruits and raw veggies too. This usually means a post-scrub soak in a cocktail of vinegar and our treated tap water.

Would you be surprised at what I'm about to say? I think the most significant difference between Saigon, with its six feet of rain a year, and the Sonoran Desert in the Southwest US, a relatively lush desert that gets about 5-10 inches of rain from its two monsoon seasons, is not the rainfall. The biggest difference is the nasty scaly buildup on the shower and tub, which is a nightmare to remove. There is none here. Mike says the municipal water is river water. The Saigon River is the main source of water for the city. River water lacks the minerals of groundwater that react with soap.

When I'm in the shower, I tend to think of the Saigon River, imagining how the water that is running over me once ran free through the city. And when I'm on the roof and scanning south, I think I can just make out the river and its charcoal grey color beyond the rooftops and skyscrapers in the distance. I've seen it up close a few times, on walks around town, and when Mike and I are driving around. It's more brownish up close, maybe 1,000 feet wide, banked by concrete and some riparian zones. The water meanders and deviates along streets and bridges, buildings and markets, past the Saigon Port, and to the Đồng Nai River beyond the city. There the waters merge and together flow to the South China Sea within a day. This river system is too far north to be part of the Mekong River Delta. Saigon has its own river, with its own thing going on. It's a lovely thing to ponder while I'm here.

Provender:
- breakfast: gỏi cuốn
- lunch : bún chay
- lāo miàn with cải thìa