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Fun

By Christina Verderosa

So where does someone go on a hot January day in Ho Chi Minh City to cool off? Well you could try Tuyet Cap Nhi Tan.

Tuyet Cap Nhi Tan, or the Snow House, is located in Dam Sen Park, a huge amusement park, which was one of the first stops for the Peacework delegation after we arrived in Vietnam. Our YMCA guides brought us into large building, where people behind a desk handed out large, heavy parkas. We put them on and went into a giant freezer.

Inside was a wonderland of ice sculptures. The entrance was a large pagoda gate lit in red, green, and yellow. We saw pyramids, sphinxes and shrines. There was however, a problem with visiting this cold climate. Since outside it was hot, many of us were wearing sandals. Peggy Bullock said the experience brought new meaning to the expression getting cold feet.

Despite chilled toes, however, we were all enjoying ourselves and admiring the sculptures, but then we spotted the slide. For just a few thousand dong, you could climb up the stairs and slide down the ice slide on something which wasn’t much different from the cafeteria trays so many of us used to use in college for the same purpose. Several of decided to try it, including me. I climbed up to the top, stood up there waiting my turn, and had a sudden thought, “The last time you slid on the ice, you fell and broke your leg.” But it was too late to back out. I managed to get down on the board and had a very exhilarating (and safe) slide to the bottom.

As we were waiting for everyone to come down the slide, I felt something cold and wet on my head. Workers were spraying the sculptures with water, which immediately froze in the cold. It was eighty degrees outside and snowing inside.

One really can’t describe Dam Sen Park as a theme park, because there are actually many themes to it. Around the lake, which is the center of the park, are large statues of cbras and other animals made of old CDs. There are also huge dragons made from painted coconut shells around a plaza where crowds very appropriately, watched a performance of the dragon dance. There are statues of the more traditional kind in the Roman garden, where one can walk among the gods and goddesses, columns and pools. There are also pagoda-like buildings with statues of figures from Vietnamese history.

The park was full of people having picnics, napping on blankets, riding the rides, feeding the carp, or getting married. We saw a number of couples in their bridal finery. Apparently the park is a popular setting for weddings, which in Vietnam tend to be very extravagant affairs.

Like good tourists everywhere, we frequently stopped for group pictures and there were plenty of photo ops; on a quaint Chinese bridge over the fishponds, in the gardens, or by a fountain surrounded by statues of horses. Group photos are serious business here; we frequently stopped to avoid getting in someone else’s picture.

The Vietnamese are fond of many of the same kinds of fun Americans are, but often with a Vietnamese twist. On our first night in Nha Trang, Peggy and I along with Apropos, John Benjamin, and two of our YMCA guides Ho Thy My Ngon and Nguyen Duong Dinh Thai visited a karaoke club. Unlike American karaoke clubs, where singers make fools of themselves in front of everyone, Vietnamese karaoke is performed in the privacy of a small suite, with a huge machine, and two microphones. So our group was considerably less inhibited that we might have been in an American club.

We had a large selection of American and Vietnamese music to chose from. Once we ran though a few songs, we noticed a peculiar characteristic of our machine. After each song, it gave the performers a score. Thai and Ngon, who sang some Vietnamese songs very well, consistently got the low scores, while our raucous renditions of such classics as “Louie, Louie” consistently scored high. By the way, the main reason I chose “Louie, Louie” was to find out if there were any words to the song besides, “Louie, Louie, oh no. We gotta go now.” There are, but we would have been better off not knowing them. But our all-time favorite was John’s rendition of Nirvana’s “Lithium”. It featured such stirring lyrics as, “I like you, I’ll kill you.” Peggy and I made several comments about, “How awful,” when we could stop laughing long enough. John insisted it had lost something in the translation.

A few days later, we went to a discotheque, and at first it seemed a lot like any other discotheque, anywhere else in the world. That is, it was loud, dark, and rather garishly decorated as a cave, complete with Styrofoam rocks.

The music was loud enough to reverberate in my stomach and the laser lights created weird patterns on the Styrofoam rocks. As dancers got out on the floor, we noticed something just a bit odd. Almost all the dancers were men.

This is apparently not unusual in the other Asian countries; I saw the same thing in Japan. (I was told it had something to do with losing face if a man asks a woman to dance and she says no. At least that’s the explanation I got in Japan.) Peggy started telling the young people they should go out and dance, but they didn’t seem too enthusiastic, so Peggy, Jean Hershey, and I decided we would go show them a thing or two. We went out on the dance floor and started gyrating along with everyone else. After all, as Peggy reminded everyone, when we learned how to dance back in the late 60’s, you didn’t actually dance with your partner. Peggy and Jean eventually left to sit down and as I was about to follow them, one brave man, decided he didn’t care about losing face, grabbed my hand and claimed me as his partner. We danced until my 49-year-old legs reminded me it wasn’t the 60’s any more.

On other occasions we were entertained by more traditional music. At our farewell party in Nha Trang, a band of musicians played traditional Vietnamese instruments. Two women dressed in traditional white ao dais, played the string instruments. One instrument looked somewhat like a zither. The other one had one string and an upright metal rod. The musician plucked the string while manipulating the rod. The men took care of the percussion instruments and the flute.

Some of the music did have a rather untraditional sound to it. One of the men performed solos on a stringed instrument that looked like a large gourd attached to a long hollow bamboo tube, with a very modern wire running out of it to a very modern amplifier. It sounded like something Eric Clapton would have played if he had been born in Saigon.

They began their program with a “traditional American folk song,” which turned out to be “Polly-Wolly Doodle”. The performance then turned to Vietnamese music, while we ate, drank and said goodbye to all our new friends at the hospital. But at the end, they went back to a reprise of “Polly-Wolly Doodle” and we did the only sensible thing.

We got up and disco-danced.

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Originally published in the DeWitt Era-Enterprise (DeWitt, Arkansas), February 21, 2002

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