Keeping your woman happy (and everyone else’s) by Mr.Noodle

June 24, 2005

Keeping your woman happy (and everyone else’s) by Mr.Noodle

The legend that is Mr.Noodle

The following is plucked from Nam tales which I documented in 2003/4 and will occiasionally update to here when I have hangover and am in need of posting inspiration.

Keeping your woman happy (and everyone else’s) by Mr.Noodle.

Road Trips “Nam style” were always entertaining affairs – The crew is usually the same, but the ever constant is myself and Tri and the unique Mr.Vho. who is our favourite driver and indeed quite a character. He is not only a Russian trained actor and singer, but also a traditional boxer here in Hanoi. He can dance the tango and the cha cha. He also has 11 girlfriends.

And a wife.

I write this and think that I could not come up with better fictional characters if I tried.

His English is fairly limited but he could chat away in russkie with comrade Vladimir fairly easily – I couldn’t place his age but imagine it to be around 40. He smokes just as much as Duong, classically commenting (via translation) that "smoking is easy to give up, I have done it hundreds of times...”

He and Duong educated me on a very common Vietnamese way of thinking, that of the attitude towards wives and girlfriends – based upon rice and noodles:

Simon (or as they pronounced at the beginning “Semen” ) you see the wife – she is like the rice – and when a man at home – he eat rice – but a man cannot have rice for every meal – just one flavour - so he must go out – and he has noodle said Duong with the slyest smug face I have ever seen

"Noodles many Flavour!” said Mr.Vho excitably

"he has many noodles" gestured Duong

when asked if he also had a fair few noodles, Duong said "something like that but not 11 – make you very tired."

Mr.Vho’s phone was a constant juke box during journeys as he, like many in the West, had a different ringtone for every “noodle”. At times humoressly not even bothering to look and answer before clicking the cancel button. Even better, as I started learning the lingo, I discovered that Pho’ means noodles and is more or less how you pronounce Mr.Vho's name. When we have to take another driver it is always a disappointment, as they aren’t really part of the family and Mr.Vho’s land rover is the sort of tank-like vehicle you need for getting about the Northern areas.

Unlike UK, closing off vast stretches of motorway moving at snails pace to complete necessary maintenance, Vietnam repairs roads as you drive – this means you have to find a way around the workers and wait for the JCB to finish its business before then trying to make it across the work in progress. This does lead to some rather hairy moments as the land rover teeters on the edge of makeshift wooden bridges and ploughs its way through Mud pits that are supposed to be alternative routes. It also means that workers can finish in quicker time, as roads are usually back the way folk intended within a month or so. However this just means that the construction moves down the hill and makes a mess of the next bit.

I’m a lucky boy in that to see as much of Vietnam as possible, you need time and money – not a lot of money I suppose – in relation to other parts of the world - but none the less if you hire a car and driver to travel all around the mountains hills and dales of Northern Vietnam, it may end up costing you quite a pretty penny to see it all. Then there is the aspect of how you know where to go? and what to do when you get there?

Having the likes of Tri and Duong around mean that you don’t need to worry about such things – The tea plantations are located at higher altitudes so you get to see images that will burn themselves upon your memory for ever - you should definitely see the evening dusk setting over the hills of Yen Bai with your own eyes – enough to bring the dead back to life.

Road trips mean long journey’s and therefore much banter – My Vietnamese improves and Mr.Vho keeps everyone entertained with his singing (when the song is a duet he humoressly attempts to sing the part of the girl in a Vietnamese chipmunk kinda way – actually this can be quite disconcerting at times). I try to give a mention to a few western CD’s but trying “Super Funky collection” caused a few furrowed brows to appear – guess it will take a little while longer before they appreciate the sheer funk genius of Stevie Wonders “Superstitious”. Slowly slowly catch a monkey.

As I explained, here in Vietnam there is the analogy of rice and noodles for wives and girlfriends – there are quite a number of ladies who are more than willing to love you long time (well an hour – erm.... not that I know) for $10 dollar - these ladies peddling their wares fit into a new category – that of “instant noodle”. Or as the crew call them “hostess” – they wanted the English translation for lady of the night and hooker and prostitute are such crude turns of phrase – therefore I went for hostess due to the amount of times that they come out with it – “look Hostess!!!” “Maybe she hostess!” etc

Later trips with Mr.Vho (Mr.Noodle) I aksed how he was keeping up with his 11 noodles (girlfriends). I now learn that this number has been reduced to 10 - when I asked him (via translation) for the reason, the reply was “Noodle past sell by date”. Legend.

Recent tales of Mr.Noodle are numerous – after work one day, he had the situation of two noodles waiting for him outside his garage – to avoid confrontation he scaled the wall out back and ran off up the road – just like Robin Askwith out of Adventures of a window cleaner. He also enlightened us with how it is that he manages to “cook” so many noodles at the same time – it’s all in the method and the magic brew apparently.

The Vho method involves “stirring” the noodle with your “spoon” slowly 7 times – then on the 8th ‘stir’ you do so quick and strong – then you go back to number 1 – very slow, until you reach 7 again, only this time there is no number 8 and on the 7th stir you move quick and strong. Basically you repeat and reduce in number down to stirring just once and then you go back up to 8 again – you do this until the noodle has, erm...reached boiling point. Cooking time? 1 and half hours is Mr.Noodles recipe for success – mix this up with some actual cooking, singing and dancing of the tango and you can make your lady a very tasty noodle......or something like that.

With 10 noodles all vying for attention, this can be quite tiring for a busy driver who also has a wife to contend with. Therefore he uses Mr.Noodles magic potion: consisting of two Goose eggs, Viet whisky and special Chinese herbs - this unique mix gives Mr.Vho the necessary will power to complete his many missions – judging by his now updated polyphonic jukebox mobiles frequent performances, his magic potion must be doing the trick – I do not, however, know whether it also gives him the “power of grey skull”.

There are things in this life you just don’t do – eating Chicken for breakfast is one, smoking on the toilet is another, letting Mr.Noodle anywhere near your girlfriend should also be added to the list - dangerous man – he offered to teach Hanh and myself how to dance the slow tango, as he says women like this very much indeed – he first said that he would teach us separately as this would be much easier – clocking what was going on bright and early, I explained that there was no way he was dancing with Ms.Hanh without my strict supervision – very dangerous man – he around noodle he will cook and leave you hungry.

One guy who should take a leaf from the vast anthology that is the Vho Noodle cook book is a compadre of Duongs – Duong explained that he was very good friends with both a man and his wife. His friend wanted some noodle time away from his wife so he told her he would be staying longer at a conference than he actually was. His wife had noticed that he had been very tired recently and that bedroom acrobatics had not been as frequent as usual – she also had picked up on a lot of little things – what these “things” exactly where Duong did not know:

“you know sometime the woman she know that something is not right but the man he is not aware – as long as he has his rice, his noodle, his beer, his tv...”

“Cigarettes?”

“yes cigarettes too..he a happy man – not complicated”

“but for woman?”

“woman complicated – some time, even myself, I do not know why a woman is angry”

“Duong, you speak the golden truth for all your fellow man”

Anyways, Duongs friend returned from his conference and spent some time living with one of his noodles – his wife, already a suspicious woman, rang his office and used a fake voice to get past the secretary (who had been told to screen the mans calls) once her husband picked up the line, she heard his voice and hung up – she knew he was in town and not at any conference.

Instead of screaming, shouting and generally going berserk (there’s a word) astonishingly she did nothing – or so it would seem. Three weeks later Duong met his friend for drinks – he looked terrible – totally exhausted – turned out that his wife had been demanding sex twice a day for the last 20 days and he couldn’t take it anymore. Consequently he couldn’t keep up with the demands of his noodles as well so now he only had his wife.

Clever woman - she can’t control his will, so she takes away his power - but if he'd known about Mr.Vho's magic potion he'd still be jumping.

Spo | June 24, 2005