Relaxing after a Math Final

We’d wanted a repeat performance ever since Moshe’s math students swooped in and organized a party in our apartment in September (see Cooking Dinner for 19, 9/27/11).  Our wish came true twice in January.

The first time we insisted on providing the food, but the students wanted to cook.  So we compromised.  We ordered a Vietnamese version of American-style pizza and they showed us how to make banh troi, sticky rice balls.  I served hot mulled cider, something they’d never tried.

Twenty students arrived on their motorbikes, exhausted from a final math exam. They brought everything they needed to make banh troi—glutinous (sticky) rice flour dough, a whole coconut, sugar and sesame seeds.  Some went right to the kitchen and started cooking.  Others took a quick nap, three in our bed and one on the couch.   Several watched television and two others played on our iPad.

Sleeping on the Couch

Meanwhile, the cooks went into action.  I helped roll the rice dough into little balls around a small chunk of brown palm sugar.  Another team was at the stove, ready to pop the balls into boiling water  and drain them.  Someone else split and grated the coconut while another cook toasted the raw sesame seeds (no pre-packaged ingredients for these kids).

Making Rice Balls

Cooking Rice Balls

When we finished, twenty small boxes of pizza were delivered (how else?) on a motorbike. Somehow we found space on the couch, ottoman, chair or floor and devoured the pizza, choosing from seafood, vegetarian, pepperoni and Hawaiian varieties.

Pizza Party

After the students cleaned up the kitchen, it was time for some entertainment.  Moshe popped a “Story of Math” DVD into his computer and a few students watched in on the television.  More popular was our favorite game, Qwirkle, which requires lining up tiles in different shapes and colors to score the most points.  Although they’d never played, these honors students caught on quickly.

Playing Qwirkle

Fiercely competitive, they played in teams, with a plateful of banh troi to nibble on when their energy lagged.  No sooner did they finish one game than they’d start another, playing three in all. Then the students quickly disappeared, some with bottles of coke and cartons of leftover pizza under their arms, leaving us to a clean and quiet apartment along with what was left of the sticky rice balls.

Three weeks later we had a return engagement when four students and a faculty member came for a final Tet celebration.  The students wanted to make sure we didn’t miss any of the traditional holiday delicacies and taught us how to make a couple of them.

They brought ingredients for making banh troi, with enough extra for us to take back home.  They also brought many Tet specialties already prepared, wrapped in green banana leaves and secured with slender bamboo ties.  We learned that the tie can be used to cut the contents of the package into even slices.

Slicing Rice Cakes

The contents of the little packages were different, but if you guessed they contained sticky rice, mung beans and pork you would be right most of the time.  They also brought popped rice cakes, which looked like Rice Krispie squares, and candied coconut ribbons.

Working together, it didn’t take us long to make the banh troi.  I took notes so I could make them once we get home.  Then they heated up the various rice cakes and we were ready to eat.

Last Tet Lunch

Dish Duty

Since the girls did most of the cooking, the boys washed the dishes.  Once the kitchen was clean, we got down to some serious games.  First we played two games of Qwirkle.  Then we taught them a card game and they taught us one.

Playing Games

When they left, Moshe and I were sorry to see them go.  Since we’re getting ready to leave Hanoi, we know it will be a long time before we find a team to come in, cook lunch with us, help clean up and spend the afternoon playing some of our favorite games .

Leaving on their Motorbikes

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Shuttered Shops

New Year’s Day was quiet.  Although the sun came out, the weather was cool and it hardly seemed like the first day of spring.  We didn’t recognize our neighborhood:  few vehicles on the road, no motorbikes parked on the sidewalk and metal shutters on the shops.  We saw three young children, dressed in their best, playing in front of their house, and an occasional family walking to pay a New Year’s visit.

Dressed Up for Tet

It is important to start the year out right.  The first visitor to arrive after midnight is carefully selected to bring good luck, usually a family member who has qualities everyone wants to emulate.

The first day of Tet is reserved for family and close relatives, living and dead.  Each family has an altar, usually with pictures of the husband’s deceased parents.   If I see a young man in uniform, I know without asking he is a brother who died in the American War.  Incense, flowers, candles, trays of fruit, coins and paper money decorate the altar.  Traditional foods are offered to welcome ancestors during their three-day visit.

Special guests and close friends visit on the second day of Tet, while the third day is reserved for teachers and business associates.  The third day is also a time for Buddhists to visit a pagoda and for Catholics to go to mass.  It is the day when ancestors return to heaven as the family burns colorful paper clothes and symbolic money, items they will need for their journey.

Visiting the Pagoda

Tet is considered everybody’s birthday.  Parents, relatives and guests give the children red envelopes containing lucky money to congratulate them on becoming a year older.   Children are taught that ancestors are important family members, whose approval and blessing must be earned by performing good deeds and avoiding dishonorable actions.

Food is an important part of the celebration.  It is not a time to experiment with haute cuisine, but to prepare simple meals reminiscent of the rural past, such as a whole chicken, pork stew with hard-boiled eggs, fish, pickled cabbage, vermicelli soup with bamboo shoots and pork, and red sticky rice.  Banh chung, a square steamed rice cake with pork and mung beans wrapped in a banana leaf, is always served.

Banh Chung

Four different families added us to their busy guest list before and during Tet.  Often as soon as we left, more visitors arrived.

Invited to Tet Dinner

Sisters Enjoying Being Together

Table Set for Tet

Visiting Our Vietnamese Tutor's Family

Visiting homes during Tet we could see  the decorations, learn about the customs, enjoy traditional food and wish our friends good luck, health and happiness in the Year of the Dragon.

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The Year of the Dragon

Tet, the Lunar New Year, is a special time throughout Viet Nam to honor ancestors, to be with family and to welcome spring.

2012 is the Year of the Dragon, a most auspicious year.  The powerful dragon conveys good luck, strength, wisdom and an especially promising future for baby boys.  It portends good fortune for others as well, bringing such blessings as promotions, wealth, health, property, good marriages and new children.

For the first time my husband Moshe and I were in Viet Nam during Tet, which we experienced both in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.  The traditions, borrowed from the Chinese and refined to express Vietnamese customs, go back more than 1,000 years.

Peach Trees in the North

Apricot Trees in the South

In our travels we observed some regional differences:  people decorate their homes with pink-blossomed peach trees in the North, while those in the South prefer apricot trees with yellow flowers.  They both like trees with kumquats or small mandarin oranges.

Tet is a little like combining Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and everyone’s birthday in one long holiday.  There’s even a dash of Passover or Easter thrown in as people celebrate the coming of spring.  Imagine having a multi-day open house, welcoming your extended family, close friends, teachers, colleagues and even your ancestors in your home, while also paying visits to others.  It must, at times, seem overwhelming.

Bringing Home the Kumquat Tree

Husbands and sons strap kumquat and peach or apricot trees onto their

Selling Paper Clothes

motorbikes and weave through traffic with bright orange fruit and colorful blossoms bobbing behind them.  We saw a woman shopping for a tree with her young daughter, who perched on her mother’s motorbike as she helped choose the perfect tree.  One street vendor piled brightly colored bags of paper clothes so high on her bicycle that she almost disappeared.  Those who don’t want to go out to buy flowers can arrange for home delivery.

h

Shopping for a Tree

Home Flower Delivery

A week before Tet, we left cold, drizzly Hanoi (50⁰F) and flew to warm, sunny Ho Chi Minh City (80⁰ F).   At night we joined the crowds on Nguyen Hue Flower Street to wonder at the giant dragons and displays of yellow marigolds and chrysanthemums.  The packed street was closed to vehicles and turned into one-way pedestrian walkways.

Crowds in Ho Chi Minh City

Dragon Fruit Trees

In the markets, we saw the same frenetic activity we had witnessed in

Fruit from the Mekong Delta

Hanoi as customers stocked up for the holiday.  In addition to apricot, kumquat and mandarin trees, plants full of plump red dragon fruit were loaded onto motorbikes.  It was hard not to get in the shopping spirit as the mounds of colorful produce, fresh from the Mekong Delta, beckoned us. The bargaining was intense and the prices went up as New Years approached.

At home, women were busy cleaning and decorating, adorning their fruit trees with greeting cards and good luck symbols, cooking at least three days worth of food, making sure their debts were paid, visiting the beauty parlor and laying out their best clothes.

Everything had to be done by New Year’s Eve, which fell on Sunday, January 22nd this year.  After that some establishments would be closed for up to nine days.  For many workers, it’s the only respite they get all year from a seven-day workweek.  By the time we returned to Hanoi on Sunday, shops were shuttered and the streets were quiet.

The Mansion Cafe

The cook at the Mansion, our local cafe, had already gone home but the owner took pity on us and asked his wife to fix us a bowl of instant noodle soup with chicken.  Fortunately friends had filled our refrigerator while we were gone so we had enough to eat for the next few days.

At midnight on New Year’s Eve, crowds gathered to watch fireworks near Hoan Kiem Lake, in the heart of the Hanoi.  But for the most part, the public displays of Tet were over as the city turned inward.  People had returned to their villages or retreated to their apartments to be with family.

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Ancient Cypress

New Years is a time for reflection.  As I straddle the years, looking forward and back, I am drawn to the memory of an ancient cypress I saw on our last day in Jinhua, China.

According to legend, King Wu-Yue Wang planted the tree some 1,100 years ago.  Over the years, King Wang’s successors grabbed and held power until they were overthrown by others with more power.  In one particularly bloody era about 20 million people were killed in battle.

The courtyard that now surrounds the cypress tree is within a palace build by one of those generals, King Li Shi-Xian, in 1861.  Artifacts displayed in the palace evoke some of the battles that sullied the kingdom.  Three-pronged spears look more useful for pitching hay than killing enemies.  Small cannons appear limited in how far they could lob their shot.  Warfare was personal then, requiring that you get close to your adversary to slay him.

Three-Pronged Spears

Old Guns

The kings, generals and soldiers are long gone, but the cypress tree lives on, a silent witness to more than a millennium of Chinese history. The tree stands tall, but not straight, its cracked bark gnarled and stained with moss.  It seems barely alive until you follow the trunk upward.  Like an old lady supported by a walker, the cypress leans on a concrete brace as it reaches toward the sky.  The crown of green leaves shows that life still flows within the old body.  Even for a hardy species, this cypress has surpassed all expectations.  The tree that symbolizes bodily death and spiritual immortality simply refuses to die.

Reaching to the Sky

What could this tree teach us about choices we make in our own lives, I wonder?  It would surely whisper about the ephemeral nature of ambition, power and conquest.  By example, it might strengthen our gritty will to live and remain true to ourselves despite adversity.  But if we strive to find our own immortality without dying, the cypress will likely keep silent.  The odds are that it will be here long after we have been forgotten.

(Thanks to our friend Professor Xuding Zhu who organized our trip in Jinhua and helped with my research on the history of the region.)

Conical hats, water buffalo and rickshaws that captured my fancy as a child were not to be seen during our recent visit to China.   Instead we watched high speed trains pull into large, modern stations and Chinese-made Audis and Mercedes cross the city on elevated freeways.

When I was growing up, it was a special treat to eat out at a Chinese restaurant.  In Shanghai today, families eat out at McDonalds, Subway or the ubiquitous KFC and have a soft ice cream at Dairy Queen.  Those not impressed by all the tea in China can sip a $7.00 latte at Starbucks. Americans can visit the country without once lifting a chopstick.  They can even shop at Walmart, where the Chinese-made products are right at home.

The Oriental Pearl Tower and the Golden Arches

Bull on the Bund

The Red Menace feared during my youth also seems missing in action.  The McDonalds logo occupies prominent real estate by the Oriental Pearl Television Tower, the second highest structure in China.   While the Bund Financial Bull has a reddish cast, its kinship with the Wall Street Charging Bull makes it an unabashed symbol of capitalism.  The Shanghai bull even charges to the right, unlike its counterpart in New York, which lunges left.

Although I don’t patronize fast food chains at home, they have their value in China.  Their restrooms usually have toilet seats (not squat toilets), toilet paper, hot water, soap and a way to dry your hands, all routinely lacking in Chinese bathrooms.   To avoid offending your sensibilities, I’ve restrained from illustrating my observations, except for a sign in a particularly disgusting bathroom.  The authorities must have felt that making everyone responsible for public hygiene relieved them of the need to provide basic amenities.  BYO toilet paper, hand sanitizer and a good pair of knees.

Public Hygiene

Riding and Texting

Beyond primitive toilets, other aspects of Chinese life might not appeal to our teenagers.  Education is taken seriously, with high school students usually living at the school and only going home Saturday night.  China’s one child policy results in intense pressure on that only child to do well.   Exams to graduate from high school and get into a good university are famously difficult.  Once they enter the university, students rely on –-not their own car—but bicycles or electric motorbikes for transportation as they continue with a challenging curriculum.

Returning from China with admiration for their trains and roads, we learned that Congress had just killed a national high-speed rail project in the U.S.  But there’s hope.  China plans to invest in the U. S. infrastructure—including rail, road and electrical networks.   “This type of investment…can help resolve the unemployment issue in the United States,” Chinese Commerce Minister Chen Deming announced recently.

Now that China is planning to help fix our lousy roads, do you suppose we can reciprocate by helping them improve their public restrooms?

Welcome Dinner

My husband Moshe and I had just arrived on the train from Shanghai with a healthy appetite.  Our host, Professor Zhu at Zhejaing Normal University in Jinhua, whisked us straight to dinner in an elegant restaurant, where we were joined by several other faculty members, all men.

The meal began with a welcome toast.  We raised our glasses of rice wine and clinked round the table.  As I took my first sip, I noticed the other guests downed the whole glass at once.  And got a refill.  We continued to sip slowly.

Dressed in black with a gold vest, the waitress brought the first course, soup in a small tureen.   I lifted the lid and tasted a spoonful of the clear broth.  It was excellent.  I then ate a delicious wild mushroom.   Next was a mystery ingredient.  Maybe a vegetable?  I gave it a try.  It was too chewy to be a vegetable, but it had absorbed the good flavors in the broth.

“This soup is delicious,” I told our host.  “What kind is it?”

“It’s made from wild boar’s stomach,” he replied.

I finished chewing the morsel I had just popped in my mouth and swallowed.  Okay, at least it was from a wild boar, which didn’t violate my avoidance of factory-farmed meat.  And it was really good.  So I ate it all.

Fortunately the remaining dishes were served buffet style on a large turntable, so I could be selective.  There was tofu, served with green vegetables and a sauce, whole steamed fish, beans with red and green chilies, bok choy, mushrooms, fruit in a hollowed out melon–I had much to chose from.

Seated next to me was Stephen, a mathematician from Nova Scotia.  Picking up a piece of roast duck with his chopsticks, he put it on his plate.  “What’s this?” he asked, puzzled.  I looked closely.  “It seems to be half a duck’s head,” I replied, secretly relieved he had found it first.  Unlike Father William in the Lewis Carroll verse, I had no desire to “finish the goose by the bones and the beak.”  Stephen pushed it to one side.  The waitress, noticing his distress, quietly removed the plate and brought him a new one.

Bottoms Up

Meanwhile the conversation on the other side of the table grew lively and loud.  Even without understanding Chinese, we knew they were having a chugging contest, emptying their glasses and refilling them again and again from green ceramic carafes. Miraculously, they could still stand at the end of the evening. Fortunately, China has strict drunk driving laws and they all took taxis home.

The secret to inexpensive and excellent Chinese cuisine, we discovered, was eating with the students.  In the university cafeteria there were several stations.  We picked the stirfry line, loading up one plate with vegetables and another with meat or tofu.  The plates were weighed and handed to a chef behind the counter, who quickly stirred our selections in a wok with flames licking up the sides.  We each got a made-to-order lunch with a bowl of rice.

Hot Pot

Next time we tried a hot pot.  After we chose our ingredients, the waitress carried a flaming pot of broth to the table where we cooked for ourselves.  Eating in the cafeteria wasn’t like this when I was in school.

In Shanghai we dined on the street.  Bordering the campus of East China Normal University, we found a row of student eateries.   Rectangular charcoal grills lined both sides of the busy, narrow street.  Each stall had a different specialty– meat, fish, shellfish, vegetables and even bananas–usually on long wood skewers.  It was easy to select what we liked and avoid food we didn’t, like sea urchin eggs and small roast ducks, beaks included.

Ready to Grill

Sea Urchin Eggs

Ducks on a Stick

Unlike in Hanoi [see Sidewalk Café in Hanoi, 10/11/11], the plastic stools were high enough for long Western legs, so Moshe was happy.  And I had a bottle of cold beer I could sip at my own pace.  We must have seemed a curious couple, with our pale faces and grey hair, far from the tourist spots.  But we fancied we fit right in with the students enjoying barbecue on a warm November evening.

Sitting Comfortably

Sipping Beer

Breakfast Bún

Bún are thin rice noodles used in many Vietnamese dishes.  Our local restaurant serves them in a steaming broth with slices of pork, tiny black and white meatballs, tomatoes, green onions, cilantro and giant upright elephant ears.  (Sorry, that’s the best translation I could find for the green vegetable, alocasia odora) Add a squeeze of lemon and a sprinkling of hot chilies at the table and it’s ready to eat, usually for breakfast.

 Eager to try some Vietnamese cooking myself, I found a soup recipe that called for  rice vermicelli.  I was sure our restaurant didn’t dump a package of dry noodles into their broth, but never thought about the craft of making noodles until I visited Phú Đo.

Noodle Village

Tucked within the city limits of Hanoi, Phú Đo is a village where many families create bún noodles for Hanoi restaurants.  We parked our car off the main road and walked under a red and yellow banner marking the village gate.  Wandering through the narrow streets we searched for a family who would let us watch them work.

Courtyard

Peering into one courtyard, we spotted the telltale wicker baskets used to transport noodles to the restaurant.  Tu, our Vietnamese friend, talked to the father, who looked suspiciously at our cameras.  After being assured we were not journalists, he welcomed us into the little compound where he and his family make rice noodles, seven hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.  They don’t rest even on Tet, the annual New Year’s celebration, because restaurants still want their noodles.

The ingredients are simple, rice and water.  It’s transforming those ingredients into finished noodles that takes two days and many separate steps.  The father, mother and one daughter make two batches a day, totaling more than 440 pounds.

Rice Delivery

While we were there, a deliveryman brought three large green bags of rice into the red brick courtyard on his motorbike.  The rice is poured into large plastic tubs, covered with water and a lid and set aside.  The next day, after the water is pressed out of the rice, the father pours it into a large electric mixer in the shed where they work.  His brother, a mechanical engineer, designed their equipment.

Mixing Machine

Clad in long white shorts and plastic sandals, the father supervises the mixing carefully, adding more pressed rice and scraping it off the sides of the drum with his hands.  To get the texture just right, he throws in a small amount of cooked noodles.  When he deems it ready, he squeezes the mixture though a cloth into a large metal pot.

Squeezing Noodle Dough

As the dough is mixed and squeezed and mixed again, it becomes smooth and shiny like thick boiled frosting.  While her husband is mixing, the wife is busy preparing a charcoal fire at the bottom of a large round stove.  She sets a shiny metal pot of water over the fire to cook the noodles.

When the temperature is right, she and her daughter begin their carefully choreographed routine.  The mother, in a bright pink blouse and black pants, scoops up the shiny dough and feeds it into a receptacle connected to a pipe.  The dough travels through the pipe and is extruded through a nozzle into the pot of boiling water.

Cooking Noodles

The two work side by side without speaking, their roles honed by years of practice.  The mother cooks the noodles just long enough, drains them in a long-handled strainer, passes them to her daughter, who drains them again and plops a round pile on a rattan mat on the floor.  They perform these operations again and again until they have cooked all the noodles.

Piles of Noodles

With that batch done, the mother scrubs everything to get ready for the next shift, which begins at 1:00 am.  Twice a day, at 4:00 am and 4:00 pm she balances baskets of noodles on her motorbike and makes the rounds of their customers.

Since our visit to Phú Đo, I have looked at my morning bowl of bún with new respect.  I’m afraid, however, that the noodles in my homemade soup will have to come out of a box.

I’m in my own reality show, a live action remake of Hitchcock’s Rear Window.  Here’s the synopsis:

Amateur photographer and blogger Sharon Morris, retired from a career in workplace safety and health, writes in her apartment in Hanoi.  Her rear window overlooks a narrow street and several other apartments, one under construction.  Everyday she is forced to watch workers exposed to serious safety hazards.

Last week I photographed a utility worker falling from the electrical wires he was working on (See Falling from the High Wire).

Working at Heights

This Monday a crew of young men started bricking in and patching holes in the building directly across the alley.  They were about four stories up, in sneakers, standing on crude scaffolding made by nailing a few boards together.   They had no hard hats or safety harnesses and were working much higher up than the utility worker.

“Platform for executions,” it turns out, is another definition for scaffold.  I could hardly bear to watch, but I couldn’t stop myself.

Friendly Wave

The next day, as if divining my distress, one of the men showed up in a hard hat. They knew I was watching them, which also made me nervous.  I didn’t want to become a distraction.  Every now and then one would wave at me.

Moving the Scaffolding

They worked their way down the wall, moving the scaffolding each time they descended.  They pried off the few boards nailed to supports stuck in the wall, picked up the loose boards and moved down to the next level, patching the holes as they went.

Yesterday the construction workers finished their job without incident, removed the scaffolding and disappeared to the other side of the building.  It’s lonely today, staring at the empty wall.  I worry about them.  Somehow I convinced myself that watching over them kept them safe.

Breaking news:  As I was working on this blog, I glanced up to see another utility worker standing on the same clump of wires where the man fell Saturday.  But this time it was different.  He was wearing a hard hat with a chinstrap and a leather belt to tie off to the utility pole.  I looked down to see a ladder against the wall.  Not OSHA-approved of course, but a ladder just the same.  The man clipped the wires, untied his safety belt and climbed safely down.  (Do you suppose someone in the government is reading my blog?)

Cutting the Wires

Climbing Down the Ladder

Stay tuned.  I sit at my desk, camera ready, like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window.  You’ll be the first to hear if there’s another installment of my reality show.

Sidewalk Cafe in Paris

Visualize a sidewalk café.  What comes to my mind is a casual but elegant little restaurant along a boulevard, a good place to meet friends, enjoy a glass of wine and a salad nicoise perhaps.  In Paris that might be what you’d find, but not in Hanoi.

One recent Sunday we had dinner with our friends Hoa and Kim at a sidewalk café in Hanoi.  As we approached the restaurant, two groups of young men ran up to the car from competing restaurants, each trying to drag us to their establishment.

Sidewalk Cafe in Hanoi

Even if we couldn’t read the signs, there was no doubt that the main dish was chicken soup.  The proprietor sat behind a counter with a tray of roasted chickens, heads still on and hindquarters in the air.  There was a large bowl of lemons and another of tomatoes, packages of herbs and a jar of some mystery liquid.

Unlike what you might find in Paris, this was truly a sidewalk cafe. We squatted on tiny plastic stools inches above the pavement, our knees against child-size plastic tables.  As we were served, we saw this was not your grandmother’s chicken soup.  Pieces of chopped chicken on the bone were bathed in a broth of green vegetables and herbs I had never seen before.

It turns out we were at a health food restaurant.  In the soup was a small dried fruit, called jujube, that looks like an olive and tastes like an apple.  This not the sticky candy sold in movie theaters, but a fruit long known in Asia and the Middle East for its calming effect.   Another ingredient was mugwort (artemisia vulgaris) also used in many parts of the world to ward off fatigue and, in some places, evil spirits.   There was a third Chinese traditional herbal medicine that, try as I might, remains a mystery.  After the soup we had tofu with sauce, sticky rice and pickled cucumbers.

Moshe on a Booster Seat

Wanting to record our latest adventure in dining, I passed the camera to Moshe.  As he struggled to get up he fell over backwards, cracking the little stool.  The waiters quickly came to help him up.  He was okay, but wasn’t sure he wanted to sit back down again.  Ever resourceful, the waiters brought two new stools, stacking one on top of the other.   Relieved Moshe sat down.  The extra few inches of height, like a child’s booster seat, made all the difference.

The soup must had a calming effect because I barely noticed the rush hour traffic zipping past us on Cau Giay street.  If one of the motorbikes ran out of gas, they could get an emergency supply from a bottle of fuel perched on a stool at the curb.

Now don’t tell me you could have such an adventure in Paris.

On the Wires

Something was rustling the leaves outside my window this Saturday morning.  The rustler was green, like the leaves of the tree, but large and moving.   A closer look revealed a worker in a green uniform, balanced on a great knot of electric wires nearly 20 feet off the ground.

My experience in workplace safety and health prompted a quick mental checklist:  hardhat, check; boots, check; fall protection, none; means of egress, unclear.  There was no ladder, not even footholds on the pole that secured the tangle of wires.

Starting Down

With a pair of clippers the man in green cut down one thick wire, dropping it to another worker below.  Then he checked in with someone on his cell phone.  Task accomplished, he started down, grasping wires for support as he descended.

Suddenly he began to fall. The images become blurry here, much as they are in my memory, the action too quick to capture in the low light.   As he started to tumble, his hat came off, clattering to the pavement below.  Then he caught himself on more wires before jumping to the ground.

Worker Falling

Catching Himself

Safely Down

To my relief the worker survived his fall without any obvious damage. This time.  The scenario was a dramatic reminder of what can happen without a safety culture enforced by good regulations.